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Ed Clark and the Abstract Shaped Canvas Anita Feldman    -2-

much on my mind at the time, about the recognition due to this artist in museum collections and in histories of American painting. The question has been answered, I think, by the quality of his work. Whatever critics and curators say or do, that work will find its place in the museums and the histories as long as it survives physically; and in the collective memory sustained by publications like this one.

At this point, though, I'm haunted by other questions--about meaning, more than memory. What did those early shaped canvases mean to Clark? To other artists? [[strikethrough]] To me [[/strikethrough]] What do they mean to us, now? These questions were raised for me and partly answered, by the perceptive response of a great critic, Walter Benjamin, [[strikethrough]] a perceptive response [[/strikethrough]] to a Cezanne in a Moscow museum: "It seemed to me that to the extent that one grasps a painting, one does not in any way enter into its space: rather, this space thrusts itself forward" and "opens up to us in corners and angles in which we believe can localize crucial experiences of the past" (quoted in Necessary Angles, by Robert Alter, p. 105). If Benjamin was right, any good painting can be said to be "a new kind of super-reality invading the [[strikethrough]] w [[/strikethrough]] world." and Clark's shaped painting was not so much an experiment as a consolidation. It worked because it made actual a visual possibility--or rather a necessity-- already present to the eye of the artist's mind. 

Clark confirmed this idea when he recalled how he felt and thought as he made the piece--oil on paper, pasted on a canvas stretcher,-with an extension that overlapped the stretcher and [[strikethrough]] was [[/strikethrough]] had to be backed with wood. "The piece wouldn't work," he told me, "until I extended it. I did it for aesthetic reasons. I was frightened, though, when I saw what I had done. I didn't know how anyone would respond to it. There was no precedent for it." Clark