“Good painting as always is a door opened to man’s spirit,” said the artist James Brooks (1906–1992), “it will not repel because of its obscurity, but may because of its directness.” One of the first and premier Abstract Expressionists, Brooks was an artistic chameleon, weaving in and out of movements and genres—Social Realism; traditional landscapes; the action painting most often associated with his closest friend, Jackson Pollock. This exhibition at the Parrish, featuring over 100 works, explores a diverse body of work that reaches from New Deal-commissioned leftist public art to Brooks’s personal reflections crafted in his Montauk studio. —Lucy Horowitz