The Football Game, 1952 – Nicolas de Staël
Untitled 1952, Paris – Ed Clark
The Big Egg, 1968 – Ed Clark
I’d like to first start off by saying, in my initial research about the life of Ed Clark, there wasn’t a whole lot online about his personal background, such as family, childhood and so on. So, sometime in the future, I might go back in for a deeper dive to see what I can find.
Okay. What I did find was that Ed Clark was born in the Storyville section of New Orleans in 1926. Ten years before Clark was born, Storyville was referred to as, “The District,” where prostitution and brothels, though not legal, were tolerated. However, with World War I, came new rules, that stated brothels could not be within five miles of a Military Base. This came from the Secretary of War, Newton D. Baker. So, by 1917, the brothels were closed and by the 1930s most of the Storyville section of New Orleans was torn down and replaced with public housing because of The Great Depression. As a child, still during the Depression era, he and his family moved to Chicago.
Sources:
Painter Ed Clark Pushes Boundaries, Literally, Shana Nys Dambrot, LA Weekly (Sept. 10, 2020)
Passages, Ed Clark 1926-2019, Jessica Bell Brown, Artforum International (Dec. 19, 2019)
Ed Clark, Abstract Painter Whose Brush was a Broom, Dies at 93, Emily Langor, The Washington Post (Oct. 24, 2019)
The Long Sweep. A Conversation with Ed Clark about His 60-Plus Years in the Art World, Jeff Edwards, Art Pulse Magazine (2013)
Godfrey, Mark and Whitley, Zoe,: Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, 2017, p.86
The Whole Art Nebula 