Untitled (Abstraction)
With the 1946–47 Untitled (abstraction) Brooks is evolving away from modernist realism to abstraction. Brooks can be seen in this work to be deriving a new vocabulary of forms based on various sources in nature as well as the work of European surrealists, who arrived in New York to escape Nazi-occupied Europe. With this work, Brooks has become part of the most advanced currents of the avant-garde in post–World War II New York; indeed his friendship with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner was enormously important at this moment in furthering Brooks’ ideas about the ways and means of making paintings in the alternately anxious and hopeful era of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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