Untitled. Paris 1952

This untitled painting was made in Paris by Ed Clark. There are still life elements happening in the painting, though they are quite abstracted and fragmented in cubist fashion. The overall palette is quite subdued, with greys, blues, white and black, until you see a pop of red, green and purple. I wonder what Clark was thinking at the time, maybe playing a game of push and pull, adding and subtracting paint to see what comes out. The black calligraphic marks, which sit on top of the colored blocks of paint, activate the space of the canvas. They create a sense of movement and rhythm that propels the eye around the composition. The shapes are simplified, but are carefully considered in their relationships to each other, like he’s thinking about Braque and Picasso’s early experiments with abstraction. It's so cool how artists are constantly in conversation with each other across time and space, building on each other's ideas and pushing the boundaries of what painting can be.