The Parrish Art Museum is organizing James Brooks: A Painting is a Real Thing, a comprehensive survey of significant scope comprised of some fifty paintings drawn from public and private U.S. collections. Throughout his long and prolific career James Brooks (1906–1992) advocated, with a messianic zeal, the primacy of paint—what happens on the surface—as the only authentic “subject” of a work of art. He embraced experimentation and shied away from developing any dominant method or style in order to avoid, as he once put it, “one’s own pictorial clichés.” Color alone remains the consistent and essential component in Brooks’s work. James Brooks: A Painting is a Real Thing will be shown at the Parrish from August 8 through October 25, 2020.
August 6, 2023