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 century and its tumultuous shifts.
