James Brooks; Pioneer in Abstract Expressionist Art

James Brooks, one of the last of the original abstract expressionist painters and known for improvisations in which he would turn his canvases to different positions as he was painting, is dead.

His wife, Charlotte Park Brooks, said her husband was 85 when he died Monday at Brookhaven Memorial Hospital on Long Island in New York. She said he had been fighting Alzheimer’s disease since 1985.

Brooks was considered one of the most innovative and technically accomplished of the New York abstract expressionists, a school of art that emphasized the showing of emotion through shape and color alone.

He was a muralist for the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration during the Depression. He created “Flight,” a 235-foot mural at New York’s La Guardia Airport that portrays man’s fascination with things airborne, dating to Greek myths. For reasons still not clear but which may have been related to anti-left sympathies, the mural was painted over in the 1950s but restored in 1980 after protests from the art world.

Brooks was born in St. Louis and moved to New York in 1927. He attended the Art Students League by night and was a commercial artist by day.

During World War II, Brooks was an art correspondent with the Army and after discharge returned to New York, where he was influenced by his friend Jackson Pollock. He worked in what were called “dripped” canvases in which images were stained on the back of a canvas to influence improvised shapes on the front.

In the 1960s, the Whitney Museum of American Art gave Brooks a comprehensive retrospective. His work is in major collections across the country.