James Brooks (1906-1992)

Stretching to nearly seven feet tall, James Brooks’ O-1953 is a joyful tour-de-force of color, demonstrating the artist’s mastery of rhythm. Richly toned scarlet, mustard and turquoise flow across the canvas, balanced by cool, earthy greens and crisp whites. O-1953 was made as the artist was reaching critical acclaim, two years after he exhibited in the groundbreaking Ninth Street Show, featuring Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Hans Hoffman, and Robert Motherwell amongst others.
Brooks achieves such luminous color through the innovative staining of the canvas, which he first discovered upon seeing paint bleed through the glue that secured drawings to a Bemis cloth. His practice teeters between the accidental and the formalized, using spontaneous splash of colors as controlled accidents from which he builds up to their finalized form. “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…Between painting and painter a dialogue develops, which leads rapidly to the bare confrontation of two personalities" (J. Brooks, Catalogue Statement for the University of Illinois, 1951).