As Paint Leaves Brush

What ever happened to all those scaffold-borne WPA muralists who did post offices and courthouses during the Depression days of the Federal Art Project? Some became bums, some are dead, some are doing toothpaste ads. Some, like Philip Evergood, became successful representational artists. And some, escaping from the chunky nude moms and arm-and-hammer mill workers, the wheat stacks and cogwheels of federal wall paintings, have turned into top-rank abstract expressionists. Next week Manhattan's Whitney Museum of American Art opens a show by one of them: 64 oils, gouaches and watercolors by James Brooks that make his old murals look, by comparison, like pages from the "F.D.R. Coloring Book."

Brooks's transition from muralist to ab stractionist was no abrupt abandonment of figure for figment. He spent three years as a U.S. Army combat artist in World War II in the Near East, earnestly carrying out official orders to paint "with the savagery of Goya, the romanticism of Delacroix, or. best of all, to follow your own inevitable star." Mustered out, the onetime commercial artist, muralist and teacher of lettering got swept into the new cult of abstract expressionism that was rocking the world in the postwar years, and has managed to turn the style into something important and intensely personal.

Surface Y. Depth. A tidy man with a soft, self-assured way of speaking, Brooks is far more concerned with shapes than with colors. "I do feel color, but I don't think consciously about it," he says. "I may start out with a vague idea of a color I want, but it just develops as I paint." His canvases have a flat quality that underscores his almost complete preoccupation with surface; the occasional effect of depth, as in his Resalns (see color), comes simultaneously with a consciousness of what lies on the plane of the canvas itself. "I like to have a progression across the canvas as well as a depth into it; a painting is only successful when it does both these things, so that you're flung back to the surface. In my less successful things, I don't keep the surface skin, and people read too much into it."

Brooks's first abstractions were linear affairs, filled with curvy arabesques and an occasional dribble like those of his friend Jackson Pollock. He tried titling them by number, then by letter, now puts nonsense syllables together to make names. Nado, one of his more recent paintings, shows his increased attention to straight lines that act both as a "container and as a dispersing agent." These lines serve not so much to limit areas of what he calls his "funny-paper colors" as to interrupt the contours of the color areas and to stimulate the eye.

Remembering the Future. Brooks is a sage man who does better than most in trying to articulate the sometimes manic-expressive business of abstract art. Of the mysterious moment when paint leaves the brush and becomes painting, he says: "The crucial thing for a painter is getting to the point where he can maintain some sort of pictorial balance between alertness and dumbness, where he is thinking but it can't be classified as thinking.

"It is a paradoxical situation. There is a moment when you know things are happening, but can't predict them. The problem is that most recognition is in terms of memory, like a Matisse shape or a Picasso shape. You want your own shapes, but since you have never seen them before, you have to feel them after they are there."

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