Brooks Willis

Art Brokerage: Brooks Willis American Artist: b. 1903-1981. Brooks Willis, a native New Mexican, studied art at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Sorbonne in Paris, France, and the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs, under Randall Davey. His artistic career was placed on hold when he enlisted in the American Volunteer Ambulance Corp. for World War II. In 1940 Willis returned to New Mexico to teach painting at the University of New Mexico with his colleague, Raymond Jonson. Other of Willis' New Mexico colleagues included Victor Higgins and Andrew Dasburg. Brooks later moved to California where his style became more cubist, perhaps due to his recent re-exposure to French modernism abroad. He became a member of the Watercolor Society of Southern California and exhibited in many important West Coast exhibitions. Stylistically his architectural abstractions and cubist street scenes harp back to an earlier decade of advanced French art, in subject they are a slice of life documenting the 1950s and 1960s urban American. Willis' work has been exhibited at the Denver Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. His work is in the permanent collections of the Albuquerque Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. Listings wanted.