Quand
Royal blue planes cut powerfully across a black field, creating a strong sense of space and movement. Shot through on the left with a vein of brilliant red, the whole composition is carefully balanced by the application of a white calligraphic flourish on the upper right side of the canvas. Quand is a French word meaning "when." The sixties, when this work was created, was a good decade for Brooks: he was honored with a retrospective exhibition that began at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and traveled to the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Washington Gallery of Art. He also spent three months as a "painter in residence" at the American Academy in Rome, and in 1969 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. As the accolades poured in, Brooks' remained true to the font of his inspiration and continued to explore what the poet Stanley Kunitz once called "the interplay between impulse and the presiding imagination."
