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Ed Clark and the Abstract Shaped Canvas: A Memoir
by Anita Feldman

Certain works command and hold our attention long before they light up our minds. One of those compelling and puzzling works, for me, was an untitled painting-collage made in 1956 by Ed Clark. I first saw it at the Brata Gallery, in a Christmas group show that opened late in 1957. Facing me as I entered the gallery (down two wide steps and through a splintery wooden door), the piece had a peremptory energy emanating, somehow, from the shape that slanted over its top edge. Because of that shape, things and thoughts had somehow changed places, in a way that seemed inconceivable until that moment and inevitable afterwards. It was as if someone had said to me, in a clear firm whisper, "Here. Now. Remember this."

I did remember. Eight years later, I suggested to the readers of Arts Magazine that, if some recent works by six other Brata members were "a new kind of super-reality invading the world," Clark's [[strikethrough]] painting-collage[[/strikethrough]] work of the fifties might be seen as "an early beachhead of that invasion." (See "The New Extended Vision," by Corinne Robins, in the September-October 1965 issue and my response in the "Letters" column of January 1966.) And, fourteen years after that exchange, I still remembered, [[strikethrough]]describing[[/strikethrough]] and I described Clark as "one of the first--if not the first--" of American artists to experiment with the abstract shaped canvas ("A Complex Identity: Edward Clark, 'Noir de Grand Talent'"?)

That last statement, in a catalogue essay for Clark's 1980 retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem, answered a question