"James Brooks, 1906-1992" is a remembrance of the the painter of the same name who had died on March 12th of that year. It was included in the Proceedings of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1992, having been delivered on Vonnegut's behalf by Jane Wilson at the Institute Dinner Meeting on November 4, 1992.
Summary[]
James Brooks working on a mural, 1940
Modest in his personal life, heroic when he painted, Brooks' work left a history of the United States during the Great Depression and Second World War that was "decent and hopeful". Afterward, he was part of the Abstract Expressionist movement, which startled the art world, with his friend Jackson Pollock. A native of St. Louis, he could draw as well as Albrecht Dürer, creating "hard-edge, starkly representational murals" for the Works Progress Administration and later, during the war, propaganda pictures of destroyed buildings and downed airplanes in Egypt. Despite being an "extraordinarily capable and idealistic illustrator", Brooks "abandoned the almost militaristic discipline" of his earlier work and in essence asked paint what it wished to do. This is best expressed by a comment made in his sixties that he would "lay on the first stroke of color. After that the canvas has to do half the work". This made him "a faithful and affectionate servant of paint and canvas".[1]
- ↑ "James Brooks, 1906-1992", Proceedings of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1992, 2nd series, no. 43, pp. 59-60.