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May 05, 2024

James Brooks: A Painting Is a Real Thing

James Brooks was, above all, a man of his times—that is, his various times. The exhibition at the Parrish makes evident what many knew Brooks to be: a very fine painter, attentive to his position in

James Brooks was, above all, a man of his times—that is, his various times. The exhibition at the Parrish makes evident what many knew Brooks to be: a very fine painter, attentive to his position in contemporary art history, to his influences and peers, to his surrounding landscapes, to society, and to history.

More than one hundred paintings, prints, and drawings are on display. There are no collages. Brooks was not devoted to any one style or medium, but spontaneously expressed himself as he wished and followed chance, setting himself up with new starting points based on unexpected occurrences—a spill, a mark, paint bleeding through fabric such as Bemis (Osnaburg) cloth, through which he could create a new, reverse abstract image.

A deep-rooted American artist, Brooks was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and moved with his parents when he was ten to Dallas, Texas. Biography and a sense of place are deeply embedded in his work. He was straight-forward, no-nonsense, faithful to his roots and branches. He traveled through art history pausing to salute a wide range of influences, from Piero della Francesca and the flatness of his paintings to the American Regionalists with their eerie narrative realism, to Diego Rivera and the Mexican Muralists, whose legacy is assured in his partially restored mural, measuring 235 feet across, commissioned by the WPA that is installed on the rotunda of the Marine Terminal at LaGuardia Airport (1939–1942). At the Parrish, a reproduced version of the painting graces most of the wall of one gallery. The painting, titled Flight, traces the history of air travel from ancient times through to Leonardo da Vinci’s designs and up through the Wright Brothers.

Cubism in its many guises underscores his work, tinged with Mattissean color-block effects and then with hints of Picasso’s brash portraiture and Gorky’s biomorphisms and then, later, the synthetic vegetal gestural weavings of Lee Krasner. But most to the point is his relationship with the landscape, which takes on so many abstract forms. The effects of his visits to Maine and then, of course, of his Long Island life, first in Montauk, where he and his wife Charlotte Park bought a small house in 1949 and set up a studio that was blown apart in 1954 by Hurricane Carol. They eventually moved the surviving structure by barge to the Springs in East Hampton near Pollock and Krasner’s home.

He, along with a select group of artists, was assigned by the War Advisory Committee in 1943, to try to give a sense, not merely the facts, of the war—that is, how the soldiers responded, how the physical and emotional effects manifested. In response, Brooks made fascinating cartoonish drawings, such as Mechanical Agony (mid-1940s) that equated the broken body of a plane with a human one—the beauty of the landscape and the poignancy of the broken limbs provide an unexpected form of drama and energy in his works.

Most to the point was the relationship he had with his colleagues—the other Abstract Expressionists, not least Pollock and Motherwell as well as Guston, but also, the rest of the tight-knit Ab Ex community, including William Baziotes, Clyfford Still, and of course, de Kooning.

Like Pollock, Brooks often poured his paints onto canvas stretched out on the floor, but Brooks’s gestures tended to be controlled, the paint sometimes applied with squeegees. The sense of his friendships shows up in the painted abstract shapes and gestures themselves, gathering in ways that seem to parallel human groupings.

In the 1960s, Brooks switched from oil paint to acrylic, leading to a simpler and clearer relation of colors, unmixed and flatter, the canvases sometimes nearly monochromatic. Ypsila (1964), for example, features white on white patches and thin black lines sketched onto the surface of the canvas, appearing almost as if blown across it or scratched by birds, in a surprising reference to nature. The lines could almost be viewed as an abstract riff on Brooks’s early training as a sign letterer.

At the Parrish, the largest gallery displays Brooks’s expansive paintings from the 1960s and ’70s. They are abstractions that seem to converse with others of their time—designed with a sense of place. They are grand abstractions that run the gamut from Miró-like Surrealist explorations into space, to darker and more gestural paintings like Juke (1962–70) with its subtle use of white giving us pause to probe and a fine orange line to the right as if to guide us through the landscape.

The exhibition, organized by Klaus Ottmann, Adjunct Curator of the Collection, with Assistant Curator and Publications Coordinator Kaitlin Halloran, is a welcome expression of form and content. It sets Brooks in an architectural context that gives his art and that of his fellow abstractionists a proper place to gather, a natural-built landscape.

Barbara A. MacAdam is a New York-based freelance arts writer.