A Marvelous Thing – Art & Antiques Magazine

From its beginnings to Abstract Expressionism and beyond, the work of James Brooks is reassessed at the Parrish Art Museum

by Lilly Wei

While James Brooks was one of the pioneering first-wave Abstract Expressionists who settled in the South Fork of Long Island long before it became synonymous with the “One Percent,” he is now among the least known of them—yet highly visible during his lifetime in the United States and abroad, his work a part of many eminent collections. The bar, of course, is inordinately high, given the fact that the relevant free-wheeling, hard-drinking, hard-working cohort included his friends Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner (with Brooks and his wife Charlotte Park, also an artist, moving to Montauk in 1950 to be closer to them and later to Springs in 1954), as well as Willem and Elaine de Kooning and other legendary artists.

The Parrish Art Museum’s “James Brooks: A Painting Is a Real Thing” (August 6—October 15, 2023), whose guest curator, Klaus Ottmann, calls Brooks the most underrecognized artist of importance in America, aims to rectify such an oversight with a reappraisal of Brooks’s achievements through the lens of current aesthetic criteria and the renewed enthusiasm for abstract painting. Featuring over 100 paintings, prints, and other works on paper—many seen for the first time as part of a gift to the Parrish Art Museum by the James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation—the exhibition offers a fine-grained picture of an adventurous, much-traveled artist whose life was composed of chapters spanning most of the 20^th century and its tumultuous shifts.

Brooks was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906 and died in Brookhaven (Long Island), New York, in 1992. He studied art at Southern Methodist University and the Dallas Art Institute; his early body of work focused on industrial sites, buildings of small towns, and workers in places such as Montana, Idaho, and Oklahoma—painted in the regional style of the American Southwest and West. He became an extraordinarily adept printmaker, a skill that helped support him when he moved to New York in 1926, beginning his career during the years of the Great Depression.

In New York City, like so many other aspirants, he attended the Art Students League in Manhattan. He was eager to be at the center of things, vowing to cast off his provincialism. One mark of his success was an invitation in 1933 to participate in the Whitney Museum’s first Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors, and Prints (later, more succinctly known as the Whitney Biennial), the first of many invitations, including one in 1963 to present a retrospective of his work. He also took part in the groundbreaking “9^th Street Exhibition” in Greenwich Village in 1951, “Younger American Painters” at the Guggenheim in 1954, and “12 Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1956.

Untitled, 1940s, gouache on paper, 10 3⁄4 x 14 in.
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y.; gift of the James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation.

Around this time, he became deeply interested in mural painting—in Renaissance frescoes and those of the Mexican muralists—attending lectures by José Clemente Orozco (with Philip Guston) and contacting Diego Rivera, whom Brooks managed to watch at work.  (Rivera was painting a series of murals downtown.) He joined the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1936 as a muralist.

Brooks’s best-known commission (and the program’s last and most ambitious) is Flight (1938-1942), a 235-foot-long, 12-foot-high, 3-panel mural for the rotunda of the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport in Queens. Brooks, always curious—and thorough, took flying lessons in order to experience the sensation of flight as a pilot. However, he didn’t like flying, he said, because he was either terrified or bored. Flight narrated humanity’s dream of flying from the beginnings of civilization to the present, referring to ancient and indigenous myths, to Icarus and Daedalus, historical figures such as Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers, and depictions of contemporary aircraft, combining the influences of the School of Paris, abstract forms, the Renaissance, and Social Realism. One stalwart, toga-draped figure in the central panel is particularly heroic, his arms outstretched, one enormous workmanlike hand sketching plans for a flying machine, head flung back, looking upward toward a darkened but diaphanous sky sparkling with stars. The mural was completed in 1942 but painted over in 1952, during the height of the McCarthy Era, with no explanation—although it was most likely too socialist in style and content to be condoned by the government. Rediscovered in the late 1970s, the mural was restored and rededicated in 1980 and is now on permanent view.

Brooks served in the United States Army, enlisting in 1942, and was designated a combat artist, assigned to Cairo. He traveled extensively throughout the Middle East—Egypt, Palestine, Syria—his time there documented in pencil drawings, watercolors, and gouaches of soldiers, military equipment, and local sites with quite a few included in the Parrish exhibition. He was decorated and discharged in 1945, returning to New York to catch up with his peers, finding himself in a new art world.

Buildings, 1933, oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in.
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y.; gift of the James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation.

He admired Matisse, experimented with Pollock’s drips, with accident, with Cubism and Surrealism, his semi-abstractions from the period summoning to mind Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Yves Tanguy. Miró was of continual interest to him, most evident in a lightness of touch and a sense of visual whimsy that appears throughout his work in brushwork, line, and shape. Irridon (1965-68) is one example, its two disarming daubs of pale blue interrupted by a black stroke, the vibrato of the modulated ground charging the ambience, creating a psychological narrative of sorts, the strokes personified. That personification is echoed in an untitled 1967 acrylic work on paper, its five black strokes also suggesting figures of sorts, the brushmarks recurrent in form, in particular the ones that resemble a hook, a reversed comma. One of his experiments in this transitional period was the use of grain sacks of Bemis or Osnaburg cloth. Their loose weave permitted the pigments to soak through to the other side, which became the genesis of the painting, discovering staining as a technique years before it became part of abstraction’s general vocabulary, seen in three works here, including a mostly green gestural work from 1952.

Brooks said that working for the WPA and the military forced him to make figurative work, but he was more interested in abstraction, as most contemporary artists who considered themselves in the vanguard were by then, committing himself to non-representational art in 1949. Brooks was soon in the thick of the culture wars of the times, enshrined in the front row of the iconic photograph of “The Irascibles” published in Life magazine in January 1951, seen by countless people and part of the archive of Abstract Expressionism. He was one of the signers of the open letter drafted in 1950 by Adolph Gottlieb (aided by Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s president, denouncing the museum’s bias against abstract art in its selection for the exhibition “American Painting Today—1950,” leading to the photo shoot in which Brooks and Pollock had driven to Manhattan from the Springs (Long Island) expressly to participate.

It seemed a decisive break with his past work, as the transition from representational to non-objective for many painters no longer bound them to external reality and its template, but to the dictates of the work itself, to the materiality of the painting and what the painting required, allowing him an exhilarating new, if perhaps daunting freedom. Even so, this work also retained connections with his past compositions, abstract forms replacing identifiable objects but often retaining a similarity of balance, such as the prioritizing of the center, whether by means of positive or negative forms, or an arrangement of forms that suggest his earlier landscapes or architectural imagery, structural elements that seem hard-wired.

Ballarat, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 60 x 60 in.
Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y.; gift of the James and Charlotte Brooks Foundation

A striking untitled painting from 1953 displays a textured welter of forceful white vertical strokes, attacked—not too strong a word—by blood red slashes from a red crayon. From there, his palette begins to sing in a higher register, with a new brightness and lyricism. The gorgeous coral and teal blue Ballarat (1978) dazzles, as does Eastern (1982). The latter is a lithograph dominated by an array of precariously close-in-value tonalities of red, their dissonance checked by shapes in grey, black and white. Some suggest torn paper as if collaged, the black alternating between figure and ground, while playful squiggles of paint in the upper right corner either dance in the dark as space, or pin the black in place, defining it as a surface. In two other major works from the period, Cambria and Elybrook, both painted in 1983 (with Elybrook in oil and Cambria in acrylic, which Brooks began to use instead of oil by the late 1960s), the palette is more sombre, mysterious, with a range of blues, maroons, and blacks, but whether light or dark, both are seductive, their vitality barely contained, the colors and forms pushing against each other as he searched for new resolutions, finding “eloquence” in the attempt.

Brooks, who could be both matter-of-fact and poetic, once said that the “painting surface has always been the rendezvous of what the painter knows with the unknown…” insisting that the work of art is a collaboration between the artist and the canvas and the only subject of painting is what occurs there. “It’s a marvelous thing,” he said. “Paintings are made with paint.”