Sargent’s comment about Clark as a harbinger of revolutionary advances in Abstract Expressionism is at the heart of what makes a work such as The Tilt so important, for it is a brilliant encapsulation of these innovations: his game-changing introduction of the push broom as a mark-making tool, his unmatched use of color, and his contributions to the ongoing yet only recently accepted conversation of how abstraction can be an effective tool for conveying the Black experience. 

In 1956, while Clark was living in Paris, he first began to experiment with alternate tools to the paintbrush, namely the push broom. Wanting to cover a larger area with broader, straighter strokes than he was capable of with his wrist and traditional brush alone, the push broom allowed Clark to create long, straight, horizontal strokes that give the impression of speed and spontaneity. Clark dubbed this breakthrough “the big sweep,” and mused on the thought that in searching for the big sweep, what he was really after was something psychological, an expression of anger, violence, or something lighter but still potent, like dance or the improvisational modes of jazz. 

This perpetual motion sustained Clark throughout his life. A frequent traveler, he was constantly soaking up the energy of his surroundings and the colors and essences of each place. This deep sensitivity to subtle changes in atmosphere and light allowed Clark to become an artist unparalleled as a colorist. It similarly reminds the viewer that more than anything else, the subject of Clark’s paintings, such as  The Tilt, is always the paint. “The truth is in the physical brushstroke and the subject of the painting is the paint itself,” Clark once said (E. Clark, quoted in J. Colby, “Ed Clark Has A Brush With Success,” Detroit Free Press, February 12, 1990, p. 6-C). 

By focusing on the formal qualities of painting instead of its representational possibilities, Clark and his fellow Black abstractionists performed a radical act that did away with preconceived notions of how one is “supposed” to express one's identity. To quote Sargent again: “In Clark’s acute abstractions, each wild or measured mark represents an extraordinary act of refusal in search of freedom. The freedom is in the way that the paint refuses to do what the eye thinks it should…. The independent movement of the paint refuses realism, power, and tradition. This refusal gets at the state of being black, where so much of the experience of making it through what are supposed to be ‘real’ barriers, beliefs, and images, begins from scratch.” (A. Sargent, quoted in  Ed Clark: A Survey, Mnuchin Gallery, exh. cat., 2018, p. 18).