With his wife, Charlotte Park, James Brooks was an important and integral part of the East Hampton art scene from their first visits in 1949, a regular seasonal rental in Montauk, and then setting up full-time residency in Springs in 1957.
But their relevance to the area seems at its zenith, at least posthumously, with current efforts to preserve their property on Neck Path. The movement was prompted after Park's death in 2010 and the discovery that their studios at that time looked as if the artists had just walked away from them, perhaps to answer the phone or get a snack. Brooks died in 1992.
So, it seems as though there is no time like the present to mount a significant exhibition of one or both of the artists. The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, which was given a significant amount of work by the artists' foundation, is doing just that this summer, opening "James Brooks: A Painting Is a Real Thing" on Sunday. It is the Abstract Expressionist's first full retrospective in 35 years, spanning his artistic output from the 1920s to 1983. The show will be fleshed out further with loans from public and private collections.
James Brooks spent his youth as a gadfly. He moved with his family so often, he said, he didn't spend more than a year at any school, until they landed in Dallas for his teens and young adulthood. It was there that he began to study art more seriously, becoming the first student at the Dallas Art Institute. Klaus Ottmann, the curator of the Parrish exhibition, describes his work at that time as that of "an early acolyte of a Southwestern abstract regionalism that emerged out of Dallas, Texas, in the 1920s."
He left Dallas with a mentor and arrived in New York in 1926, getting down to the business of study, sign painting, and mural making, which became a primary occupation for artists in the years during the Great Depression.
His mural work included "Flight," a painting in the Marine Air Terminal rotunda at La Guardia Airport. Brooks told an interviewer for the Archives of American Art in 1965 that he spent four years working on it. It was painted over at one point in the 1950s, presumably because of perceived Socialist subject matter, and then revealed again in 1980.
He also had a unique experience of being one of a few "combat artists" who spent much of World War II documenting various theaters of battle with paintings and photography. He was in Cairo until he was called back, going to work in Washington, D.C., at the Office of Strategic Services, where he met Park, who was also working there.
Mr. Ottmann noted that the Parrish's collection of the artist's work includes objects from the early periods of his development, some shown publicly for the first time.
Brooks returned to New York after the war was over, falling into the artist community that became known as the New York School, and moving into the apartment abandoned by Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner when they moved here. Park would follow later and they would marry.
The move to Springs reinvigorated Brooks, who found he could work on larger pieces with different materials that took his staining method in new directions. He experimented with crayon, sand, and other materials. By 1964, he was using an 80-by-74-inch support for his painting "Obsol." He titled his paintings with invented words with no meaning or context attached to them.
He eventually switched to acrylic paint and then moved into the studio he built for himself, which is at the center of preservation efforts. The skylights and expansive space contributed to even larger canvases. Whereas other artists from his era may have struggled to find relevancy as the art world moved on from abstract paintings, Brooks was having a fertile period throughout the 1970s. The organizers note that during his career, the artist "continued to seek new territory each time he approached the canvas."
The exhibition of more than 100 paintings, drawings, and prints will be presented in chronological order, starting in the 1920s, with Social Realism, abstract works from the 1930s, his post-military work that references the war, and then his discovery of a new approach to painting, a staining method he developed in 1948.
A fully illustrated, 176-page catalog with essays by Dr. Ottmann and Mike Solomon, an artist and writer, a detailed chronology, a complete plates section, and a checklist of works will accompany the exhibition.
