TitleKardom
Artist
James Brooks
(American, 1906 - 1992)
Date1981
MediumAcrylic on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 32 × 36 in.
Framed: 33 1/4 × 37 1/4 × 2 in.
SignedSigned at lower right: "J.Brooks". Verso: "'Kardom' 1981 Acrylic / James Brooks / 32 x 36".
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, October 3, 1984
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1984.31
Label TextOriginally from St. Louis, Missouri, James Brooks undertook his earliest artistic training at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In the summer of 1926, he moved to New York City, where he worked as a commercial illustrator while attending night classes at Grand Central School of Art and later the Art Students League. In the 1930s Brooks explored the rhythmic strokes of the Social Realist style, executing a series of murals commissioned by the WPA's Federal Art Project. His most famous mural, "Flight," was completed in 1942 and installed in the Marine Air Terminal in New York's LaGuardia Airport. These federal commissions brought him into contact with artists such as Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston, ANA elect. In March 1942, however, Brooks enlisted in the army, serving two and a half years initially as a Civil Pilot Engineer stationed at Mitchel Air Force Base, Long Island, and soon thereafter as a combat artist stationed near Cairo, Egypt. In the summer of 1945 he returned to New York. Anxious to restart his artistic career, Brooks focused exclusively on painting, eschewing all commercial assignments that would have encroached on his time. He revived his connections to the art scene and even moved into Jackson Pollock's old New York City apartment. The late 1940s was an invigorating period of radical experimentation and innovation; Brooks's unprecedented use of the staining technique during this time has even led some to question whether it was Brooks or Helen Frankenthaler who truly pioneered the groundbreaking procedure. Speaking of this decade, Brooks declared that "it was about time for Freud's seeds to really ripen." By 1949, Brooks's art was conceptually and aesthetically in line with New York's avant-garde, abstract scene. His luminous expanses of unmodulated color and pure expression evoked a spectrum of colors. Although often overshadowed by his fellow Abstract Expressionists, Brooks's ability to harmonize the strata of spectral dissonance within multilayered compositions of hatched strokes and chiseled lines was not overlooked by the Whitney Museum of American Art, which venerated Brooks with a retrospective exhibition in 1963.
"Kardom" is rooted in Brooks's 1960s exploration of acrylics and exhibits a grace and clarity that had matured after decades of artistic development. The composition presents an elegantly orchestrated arrangement of forms, punctuated by slabs of pure, clearly defined color that highlight the process and materiality of paint. "Kardom's" broad areas of limited color range interspersed with gestural drips and brushstrokes harmonizes the disparate elements of tranquility and dissonance to present an infinitely expansive composition. Wishing for his work to speak for itself rather than be mediated by textual explanation, Brooks remained virtually silent in the face of questions of meaning and interpretation. He has, however, offered insights into his process: "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. . . . At some undetermined point the subject becomes the object, existing independently as a painting."
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