Ed Moses (1926-2018) was an American painter and printmaker, and a defining figure of postwar West Coast art, whose restless practice spanned more than six decades.
Born in Long Beach, California, Moses did not initially pursue art. After serving as a surgical technician during World War II, he intended to become a doctor, enrolling in a pre-med program at Long Beach City College. Unable to memorize the curriculum, he dropped out – and on a whim took a life-changing class with painter Pedro Miller, who recognized his untapped talent. Moses changed course entirely, enrolling in UCLA’s MFA program, where he met Craig Kauffman, who in turn introduced him to future Ferus Gallery owner Walter Hopps.
Moses was among the first generation of artists shown at L.A.’s legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957. There he became part of the “Cool School” – a collective that included Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, and Ken Price – all of whom shaped the nascent Los Angeles art scene.
His canvases are formal abstractions using a variety of processes to experiment with surface, creating striations, cracks, marks, and blurs, sometimes juxtaposed with hard-edge geometric abstraction. Later in life he developed his celebrated “crackle paintings,” whose layered surfaces resemble tree bark or parched ground.
Printmaking was equally central to Moses’s practice. Printmaking held enormous appeal for him throughout his career, often serving as a means to explore his most provocative themes and formal developments. He won the prestigious Tamarind Lithography Workshop Fellowship in 1968, and his printed works ranged from geometric lithographs and color screenprints to technically ambitious aquatints. His 1993 LACMA commission PARTS-DARC – a six-color aquatint with sugarlift, spitbite, and chine collé – was inspired by the cave paintings at Lascaux and the L.A. riots, blending the ancient and the urgently contemporary.
A student of Buddhism who meditated daily, Moses was a spiritual descendant of the Abstract Expressionists. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1980 and was the subject of a major retrospective at MOCA Los Angeles in 1996. His work is held at LACMA, MOCA, the Hammer Museum, SFMOMA, the Whitney, and MoMA New York.
