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Alexander Brook

Alexander Brook, born in Brooklyn, studied at the Art Students League in New York with Kenneth Hayes Miller from 1914 to 1918. A critic for The Arts during the early 1920s, he became an assistant for the newly-founded Whitney Studio Club in 1924. It was at this time that he began to paint in earnest, traveling and exhibiting widely with his first wife, the artist Peggy Bacon; the two were members of the Woodstock art colony. During the Depression, Brook taught at the League and won several fellowships and important prizes, enjoying broad success.

Brook's aesthetic was deliberately non-modernist. Rather, his view of civilization was both intimate and elegiac in tone, suffused with a world weariness. In 1938, he moved to Savannah, Georgia, where he rented studio space overlooking the Savannah River. The poverty of the South appalled him, yet he also found in it a subject that would lead to some of his finest and most moving images. These works, executed in an American realist mode, included evocative landscapes, portraits, and genre paintings rendered in soft brushwork and muted colors.
After resuming his teaching post at the Art Students League, Brook performed numerous services for the war effort and painted commissions for Life magazine. At war's end, he he returned briefly to Savannah, before settling permanently in Sag Harbor, New York. As abstract art grew in popularity, Brook withdrew from the public eye.

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