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beautifully. It was good to talk about your work with him because he attacked it in a structural way - not bringing in other meaning that painting has that you can't talk about too much. Other times he would go into a very interesting monologue about the things in painting you had done that provoked him in a psychological way - the images - the strange formations you were bringing out or repressing." The first display of Brooks' distinctive post-war painting was in 1947 when his "Dialogue" appeared in a group show titled, "Abstract and Surrealist American Art" held at the Art Institute of Chicago.  It showed the European influence of [[strikethrough]] Tomlin [[/strikethrough]] Braque [[strikethrough]] (European) [[/strikethrough]] in cubism and the use of cool tones of blue and green. Guston's art may have suggested the masked figures, although these might also refer to the work of Picasso. However, these works continued Brooks' earlier use of bright colors and sections of his murals. [[strikethrough]] His friendship with Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, strengthened when Brooks took over the Pollocks' old studio and expanded even more when, in 1949, [[/strikethrough]] He began to use the Montauk section of Long Island as his summer studio. His 1948 summer in Maine had loosened his work but it was Pollock's influence that encouraged the change to a more fluid use of space and a greater reliance on automatism and chance. 

Brooks' work beginning in 1949 tended to replace his modified cubism with abstract expressionism. He is quoted in the 1952 Catalogue of Contemporary American Painting for a University of Illinois exhibition as saying, "My painting starts with a complication on the canvas surface, done with as much spontaneity and as little memory as possible. This then exists as the subject. It is as strange as a new still life arrangement and as confusing as any unfamiliar situation. It demands a long period of acquaintance during which it is observed both innocently and shrewdly. Then it speaks, quietly, with its own peculiar logic. Between painting and painter a dialogue develops which leads rapidly to the bare confrontation of two personalities..... At some