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JAMES BROOKS:
CRITIQUE
AND
CONVERSATION

For the painter a process of "grubbing", for the critic an emotional investigation, James Brooks' work is a continuing Abstract Expressionism.

APRIL KINGSLEY

James Brooks, Olan, 1974.
Acrylic on canvas, 64 x 76". Courtesy Martha Jackson Gallery.
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[column 1]
Problem #1: James Brooks' paintings are obviously beautiful; they are "mood paintings." Can such pictures withstand thoroughgoing, serious critical attention? Does a great deal of surface variegation-niceties of textural, factural, coloristic, and compositional gradation-mitigate a painting's impact? How complex can a painting be and still be strong, weighty, and powerful?

Problem #2: There have been no dramatic shifts in Brooks' style since he established it in the late forties. Because the art market prefers "new" merchandise yearly to make sales easier, should the artist suffer public or critical disfavor if he fails to provide it? Is a non-linear development necessarily good or bad?

Problem #3: Brooks' paintings in any given show seem outrageously varied. Can one work effectively in mixed image clusters instead of in series or progressively where the "improvement" potential is maximized?

Problem #4: It is hard to remember specific Brooks paintings since they lack wither a unitary, holistic image or a hierarchical structure. How important is the recognizability [column 2] factor to public and critical acceptance?

Problem #5: Brooks' open-ended methodology, held in check only by a Cubist critical approach to the results, leaves him and the viewer uneasy when making quality judgements among his works. Does his "under-controlled" technique negate precise critical evaluation?

These are some of the problems posed by James Brooks' words and work. When first confronting a group of his paintings I feel a vague sense of disquiet. I think, "They all look alike" or, conversely but simultaneously, "They all look too different from one another." Their otherworldly color is unsettling as is their soft texturing and deliberately awkward shaping. But as time is passed among them, a dramatic shift occurs in my feelings about them. The pictures start to speak: some whisper, others shout; one is warm and friendly, while another seems violently angry and a third so somber it is silent. Each painting has an interior mood, a time, psychology, temperature, season, and tempo independent from that of its neighbor. As a totality the group of pictures slowly comes to seem evocatively wealthy and stately [column 3]with honorableness that is unquestionable. Yet, in that totality there is an unfinished element, as though there may be another painting somewhere that does it all, or better, or clearer. It is strange to feel these things about an artist's work. Disturbing.


James Brooks is a quiet, gentle man who lives with his wife, painter Charlotte Park, in the Springs, Long Island. He was born in Texas 69 years ago and lived in a number of different Western cities as a boy. He retains a deep love for the life, light, and space of the West he remembers. He moved to New York in 1926 to study at the Art Students League. His work during the thirties was realistic, sharing some of the stylistic traits of a Social Realism, but not its political implications. As a muralist on the WPA, Federal Art Project, he combined realistic "Giottesque" figuration with nonobjective and symbolic forms in highly complex, enormously ambitious allegories. These murals completely absorbed him until 1942 when he was drafted as a "combat artist" to serve in Egypt and the Near East.

All these years of non-easel painting left him virtually styleless in that medium. His return to New York in 1945 finally left him free to search [column 4] for a way back into it. The painter Wallace Harrison provided that way between 1946-47, giving Brooks a thorough grounding in Cubist composition with and against which he was able to work thereafter. That training and his close friendship with Jackson Pollock and Bradley Walker Tomlin, in particular, during these early post-war years established the basic material out of which he developed his own idiom. By 1948 his close-packed, rigidly rectilinear Cubistic abstractions gave way under the pressure of the spontaneous approach which had become rampant in the New York art world. Brooks' paintings became looser, more calligraphic, and active, though they retained a certain gentleness that seems basic to him, as it was to his friend Tomlin. In the summer of that year he accidently discovered his own method of producing "the unexpected" which liberated him from "composing." Using black glue to affix collage elements to the canvas caused irregular, ephemeral shapes to stain through to the reverse side which he came to find more interesting and usable than the consciously chosen elements on the front. He then proceeded to work both sides of the canvas for a while before selecting the