Fairfield Porter

To be a realist painter and a critic during the age of Abstract Expressionism took great courage, but that is exactly the role played by Fairfield Porter (1907–1975). Although he felt he was a better critic than painter, he managed to create an individualistic style counter to the dominant trends of the day.

Porter was born in Winnetka, Illinois, into comfortable circumstances. His father was an architect who purchased Great Spruce Head Island, off the coast of Maine, where the artist spent many summers throughout his life. Porter was a bright student at New Trier High School, and attended one year at Milton Academy before going to Harvard University where he majored in art and art history. In 1928, he moved to New York and took classes at the Art Students League where he studied with Thomas Hart Benton. The family had traveled together to Europe several times before Porter finished college, and in 1931–1932 he returned and spent several months in Italy. His older brother, Eliot, was the noted color photographer and director of the Sierra Club.

During the Depression, Porter became involved with politics and socialism, and lived a somewhat restless existence with his young family in such places as New York City, Westchester, New York, and Winnetka. In 1949, he purchased an old house in Southampton, on Long Island, about ninety miles from Manhattan. From 1952 to 1959 he wrote reviews for Art News, followed by two years writing for The Nation. Many admirers of Porter’s art have commented that his work as a critic impeded his own development as an artist.

In the early 1940s, Porter became good friends with the great Abstract Expressionist painter Willem deKooning, and was one of the first to purchase a work by him. In 1952, deKooning reciprocated and promoted Porter’s work to his own dealer, Tibor de Nagy, saying “I’ve got a good artist for you. Someone who knows how to paint really good—Fairfield Porter.” Pressed by the gallery’s director, deKooning admitted, “Yes, he is a friend, but I’m telling you Porter is really good. He knows what he is doing!” [1]

High on the list of painters whom Porter admired were the French artists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, both known for their intimate interiors. Similarly, Porter frequently painted family members and friends, sometimes awkwardly posed, in light-filled settings both indoors and out. His colors tended to be bright, and his brushstrokes uneven, almost casual. His landscapes—of his beloved Maine and Long Island—are fresh and evocative. Porter’s realism eschewed the precision and detail one finds in photographs by his brother.

Like the paintings of Bonnard and Vuillard, Porter’s canvases cry out for a narrative that does not exist. In lectures at Yale University and Amherst College, where he taught 1969–1970, he expressed his belief in “art for art’s sake,” a theme reiterated in a 1968 interview. “What I think now is that it doesn’t much matter what you do. What matters is the painting. And since a reference to reality is the easiest thing, you just take what’s there. And then, whether you’ve made anything or not, you hope it’s significant. Well, what is significant? What counts? It’s where this aesthetic business comes in.” [2]

In addition to numerous articles on the major artists of his day, Porter wrote a book on Thomas Eakins, the great Philadelphia figure painter. Porter and Eakins shared a penchant for portraying moody-looking people. Porter also wrote poetry, and many of his closest friends were poets. In one poem, A Painter Obsessed by Blue, he salutes blue, the color that radiates over and over again from his canvases.

No color isolates itself like blue.

If the lamp’s blue shadow equals the yellow

Shadow of the sky, in what way is one

Different from the other? Was he on the verge of a discovery

When he fell into a tulip’s bottomless red? [3]

Notes:

[1] deKooning, quoted by John Bernard Myers, Fairfield Porter, Realist Painter, exhibition catalogue (New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1963), 41, quoted in John T. Spike and Joan Ludman, Fairfield Porter: An American Classic. With a Checklist of the Paintings by Fairfield Porter (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1992), 98.

[2] Porter, interview with Paul Cummings, June 6, 1968, in Kenworth Moffett and John Ashberry, et al. Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 57.

[3] Porter, quoted in Moffett, Fairfield Porter, 88.