"That First Quick Look"

To Painter Alexander Brook, the first goal of an artist should be "to make each work more magical than the one before." This gets harder as a man gets older. But last week in the summer port of Ogunquit, Me., a new one-man show of 31 paintings by Brook shows that the magic has been pretty well distributed over a long lifetime. The show reaches back to 1924, ranges in subject from an affectionate portrait of a puppy, to broad, brooding landscapes, to snapshots of young girls caught at some moment of loneliness. Brook is a lusty personality who uses a lyric brush to paint not the dramatic but the tender side of life.

At 64, he is a brawny, barrel-shaped man who is up at dawn each morning for a full day of puttering and painting at his thick-beamed home in Sag Harbor, L.I. He may mend a broken piece of furniture or glue together some shattered crockery, but his mind is never far from the converted stable he uses as a studio. There, either painting from a model or from memory, he turns out nudes, landscapes, portraits and still lifes that are flecked with fragments of earthy humor and yet are generally bathed in sadness. A Brook painting does not scream for attention: the colors are usually subdued and subtly graded, the mood is muted, and the technique is so sure as to be unseen, like an invisible seam.

Teacher in a Cutaway. Brook got some of his first lessons in technique from a character in Manhattan who made his precarious living by doing oil blowups of photo portraits. "He seemed a real artist," Brook recalls, "in a cutaway and striped trousers, working his little brush at breakneck speed. He would produce anything you could imagine--a battleship, a seascape--with dazzling facility." At 16, after a bout with polio that fortunately left no traces, Brook was painting ancient statuary at Pratt Institute; at 17 he enrolled at the Art Students League where in time he became a member of the faculty. Life became a succession of successes. He had close and congenial friends in Painters Niles Spencer, Louis Bouche and Peggy Bacon (whom he married in 1920), and every year seemed to bring on a new academic fellowship or another award. Until the tidal wave of abstract art inundated the galleries, no show of contemporary U.S. art seemed complete without an Alexander Brook.

Pause Between a Breath. He is out of the public eye these days, neglected by the chichi but not forgotten. The excellent little new museum in Ogunquit, run by Painter Henry Strater, has in past years given similar one-man shows to Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and Andrew Wyeth. As an artist, Brook respects such innovators as his fellow Long Islander, the late Jackson Pollock, the master dripper. The people Brook resents are those faddists who promote abstract art and will enthuse about nothing else. He also has an oldster's dismissing attitude toward those younger artists who, he says, display their contempt for discipline and craftsmanship by deliberately using materials that are doomed to perish.

Whether it be a picture of a young girl fixing her hair, or a dog staring at a lonely country house, a Brook painting is apt to have an air of expectancy about it--"a pause between a breath," as Brook's present wife, Painter Gina Knee, puts it. "My approach." explains Brook himself, "is immediate. You can drive past a thing 20 times, and then something will say. 'This is not a landscape: it's a painting!' I try to maintain that first quick impression, that first quick look."

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