DAN’S PAPERS
February 28, 2014 Page 11
Photo by Maurice Berezov, courtesy Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center
danspapers.com
James Brooks and Charlotte Park at their Montauk property, circa 1954. Inset: The Brooks–Park house in Montauk, circa 1954
Piece of History Should the Art Studios of James Brooks and Charlotte Park Be Preserved?
B
eginning around 1949, approximately 20 young New York City artists and sculptors met regularly at an 8th Street apartment they called “The Club,” and, after some discussions, agreed to migrate en masse to East Hampton to establish an art colony here. There were many reasons for the move. Post-war housing was one of them. There were not enough apartments to accommodate returning GIs at the time. There was also the tumult of the city versus the peace and quiet of the Hamptons. The artists who came here, mostly men but some women, worked in many formats and styles, but what they are most known for is that their arrival made the Springs section of this town a hub for Abstract Expressionism, a new way of looking at things through painting that soon became acknowledged as a new art movement. Indeed, for a time, 50 years or more, this town was considered a major working art capital of the world. The news that the home and studios of James Brooks and his wife, the painter Charlotte Park, have been left abandoned since her death, in the woods in Springs, has sparked some interest in saving what’s left of this historically important community. I say what is left because, for some
reason, the Town of East Hampton placed such difficult restrictions on the creation of separate art studios, including that they be demolished after six months if not in use, that the importance of this community, particularly during the half-century it was in its heyday, may soon be gone forever, without a trace (with the single exception of the art studio and home of Jackson Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner). But let us begin with James Brooks’s studio that’s in the news up in Springs. Brooks, an important member of this community, became famous for his grand mural in the rotunda of the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, completed in 1940. It was 12 feet high and 237 feet long along the walls, coming around to meet itself. It was painted over for a time. It is today, back and fully restored. Brooks was born in Missouri and raised in Texas and Colorado, the son of a traveling salesman, and at 20 moved to New York City just prior to the Depression and became part of that city’s art scene. He did that mural, and numerous others, for the WPA (Works Project Administration), the government art project. During the Second World War, he was a soldier attached to the OSS, the American overseas intelligence agency, based in Cairo. Through some kind of crack in the military
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system, his assignment there, along with the assignments of numerous other artists, was to paint scenes of American war equipment and soldiers behind the lines. It was actually a military order. Brooks, in an interview he gave in the 1960s that’s now in the Archives of American Art, remembered it as, “You’re free to carry a camera and photograph secret installations, to enter such and such and such and such. So we had entry everywhere, [to] paint with the romanticism of a Delacroix, with the savagery of a Goya, or, best of all, follow your own inevitable star.” That must have turned a few heads amongst the colonels. It was in Washington, D.C. that he met another artist, Charlotte Park, 12 years his junior, also working at the OSS. When he returned to New York City, he returned with her, and they were soon married and were to live and work together for more than the next 50 years. They moved to Montauk in 1949, two years after they married, and settled in a small fisherman’s house and outbuilding on a cliff at Fort Pond near the Navy dock. The outbuilding, which became their shared studio, faced north, as it faced the water, taking advantage of the northern light so favored by painters. In 1954, Hurricane Carol (Cont’d on next page)
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By Dan Rattiner