Ed Clark

From his pioneering use of painting tools such as push brooms to his innovation of the shaped canvas, the impact of artist Ed Clark’s (1926–2019) work on the course of abstract painting in America was profound. On both sides of the Atlantic—in New York and in Paris—Clark witnessed and participated in myriad pivotal developments in mid to late 20th-century art history, counting artists such as Willem de Kooning, Beauford Delaney, Joan Mitchell and David Hammons among his friends and acquaintances.
This publication recounts the story of Clark’s art, life and career through reprints of important historical texts and interviews with the artist, as well as photographs, letters and ephemera from his archive.

Drawn from the extensive personal archive of photographs, negatives, contact sheets and scrapbooks of Ed Clark (1911–2000), these three volumes reveal the work of a key figure from the golden age of American photojournalism. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Clark is one of the 20th century's most fascinating and important "unknown" photographers. His best-remembered work captured a weeping Graham W. Jackson, Sr. playing his accordion as the body of the recently deceased President Franklin D. Roosevelt was being transported to Washington, DC. From the pageantry of politics to the rhythms of small-town life, from movie stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe to the working class, Clark covered the defining personalities and events of his age.

A gifted photojournalist, Clark began his career in 1929 with The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville, and went on to work for 22 years for Life magazine. He photographed many of Life's most important assignments during the period of the magazine's greatest cultural impact; Clark's images helped shape a nation's sense of itself and the world. His vast range of subjects includes the Nuremberg war crimes trials; the conflict over civil rights in the late 1940s and early '50s; Hollywood stars and the movie industry of the '50s; the people and the arts of the Soviet Union; and the White House during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. Through Clark's eyes, we witness some of the central episodes and themes of the postwar world.