Margate beach in a heatwave is a sight to behold. The sands are seething with funmakers right out to the distant waterline, where silhouettes mark the silver waves like dabs from an artist’s brush. It could be an impressionist beach scene, or perhaps a photo by Weegee of Coney Island circa 1940. I wonder what percentage of this joyful summer multitude will make it to the big art shed at the end of the curving promenade?
There is a massive gulf between the raw rambunctious reality of Margate sands and the show inside this gallery, which could have been specifically chosen for its total lack of meaning or connection for anyone from that beach who wanders in here by mistake.
You might think a summer show of seaside paintings by the likes of Monet and Degas, or JMW Turner seascapes painted right here in Margate, or even a history of The Beano Summer Special, might be a good way for this gallery to relate to Margate’s popular seafront. Instead it has an exhibition of American abstract art by the late Ed Clark, who died in 2019, that hangs here elegantly, ungiving and inert.
Paintings of nothing are, of course, meant to be a slap in the public’s face. The first abstract artists, who exhibited pure geometric shapes and unmixed primary colours in early 20th-century Europe were avant garde revolutionaries visualising a new world so unimaginable it could only be pictured in a non-picture – a Malevich Black Square, a Mondrian grid. Then in the 1940s abstraction was born again in New York, this time with a dark Romantic spirit and vast American scale and freedom: abstract expressionism.
I love abstract expressionism: the curling mysterious clouds of Jackson Pollock’s jazz-like dances, the terrifying walls of colour cut by shafts from heaven that Barnett Newman created, the purple cosmos and bloody infinities of Mark Rothko. But it would be complacent and absurd to pretend that all abstract art is good, simply because in the imagined eyes of philistines it is silly.
Ed Clark’s canvases are weak and sadly derivative examples of the fashion for painterly vagueness unleashed by the original abstract expressionists in postwar America. There is too much going on. Too many colours, too much brushwork, too many layered lines. He can’t quite decide what kind of abstract expressionist he is. Does he want to be a wild sprawler of spontaneous painterly gestures? Or an introverted soaker of canvases with beauteous stains?
His Pollock side comes out in the wide wavy marks he made with a floor brush on canvases laid flat on the ground. But he echoes Rothko in layering horizontal bands on top of each other – and even Newman in adding lines, though his are horizontal and irritatingly graphic. He’s so ordinary, he might almost be British.
There is something absolutely miraculous and unlikely about a great abstract painting. To paint with colour alone, excluding recognisable images is a joke – yet a Rothko or Riley make the ridiculous utterly sublime. When it fails, it is mere decoration. Wallpaper. The problem with Clark’s work is that however much he fusses over how to make his “marks” or add nuances of pink or splashes of blue, it doesn’t communicate much purpose. Where is the expression in these abstractions? I am not feeling them. Too much surface business leaves no sense of underlying passion or vision. What you see is what you get – pretty colours on a wall.
Clark probably struggled to get his paintings seen at all. He started his career far from New York, in 1950s Paris, where he was possibly more accepted as an African American artist than at home. He’d fought in the segregated US army in the second world war. Later in his career he had his first retrospective at the Studio Museum, Harlem.
Yet, as the gallery itself points out, Clark spent his life “refusing to have his work interpreted through the lens of race”. He succeeded by adopting a pure abstract style. In a film in the show, he bats away the most tempting cliche a critic might apply to a black abstract expressionist: much as he admires jazz, he explains, he does not play it or any other music when he paints – the visual is its own sphere.
The truth on view here is that Ed Clark was one of the lesser American abstract painters. He deserves a place with many others in histories of abstract expressionism and its aftermath. But I have no idea what his work is doing in Margate.
• Ed Clark is at Turner Contemporary, Margate until 1 September 2024
