Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter (1907-1975)

Fairfield Porter was born the fourth of five siblings in Winnetka, Illinois, to a prosperous architect father and a mother who stimulated her children’s interest in writing and the arts. Porter has been variously identified as a classic American painter, a Realist, and an intimist. Although he always remained a painterly Realist, he was a knowledgeable admirer of the predominant Abstract Expressionists of his era and of the tenets of their art-making, which he incorporated in his work. Porter’s oeuvre, teachings, and writings influenced an entire generation of American figurative artists.

Porter spent almost every summer at of his life on Great Spruce Head, an island in Maine that his father had purchased in 1913. When he was fourteen, he traveled with his family to Europe, where he was exposed to the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, Veronese, and J. M. W. Turner. He graduated from the Winnetka public schools, and went on to Harvard University, where he studied the fine arts with Arthur Pope and Kingsley Porter. In 1927, the summer following his junior year at Harvard, Porter went on a trip to Moscow that strongly influenced his life and thought. After graduating in 1928 he moved to New York and for two years attended the Art Students League, where he studied with Thomas Hart Benton and Boardman Robinson. In the ensuing years he traveled to Italy, Germany, Spain, France, and England. The work of Edouard Vuillard made a profound impression on him. In 1932 Porter married the poet Anne Channing and they raised a family of five children. Willem de Kooning became a friend and a major influence. Porter’s first one-man exhibition was held at the North Shore Art Center in Winnetka in 1939.

During World War II Porter studied at the Parsons School of Design in New York with Jacques Maroger, who introduced him to a rediscovered Flemish and Venetian painting medium that Porter used from then on. In 1949 he and his family moved to Southampton, Long Island, where he lived for the rest of his life. The majority of his paintings were produced there or Great Spruce Head. A group of poets who became known as the “New York School”: Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch became Porter’s close friends, as did the painters Alex Katz, Robert Dash, Jane Freilicher, Neil Welliver, Jane Wilson, and Paul Georges.

In the 1950s Porter became a noted art critic and reviewer for several periodicals, including “Art News” and the “Nation”, and he received the Longview Award for an article on Willem de Kooning. After 1951, when he first showed at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Porter had a succession of one-man exhibitions in New York and participated in six Whitney Museum annuals, from 1959 to 1968. During this period his work was shown in museums and colleges throughout the United States and a retrospective was held at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1966. In 1968 Porter’s work was shown at the prestigious Venice Biennale.

A series of one-man shows of Porter’s work were held in the early 1970s at the Hirschl and Adler Galleries in New York, and during those years he produced his first large-format color lithographs. A traveling retrospective organized by the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, Long Island, was held in 1974-75. He died in Southampton at the age of sixty-eight.

Laurence at the Piano, 1953

Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. (101.6 x 76.2 cm)

Signed and dated (lower left): Fairfield Porter 53

General Purchase Fund (1990.7)

“Laurence at the Piano” epitomizes Porter’s approach to in just as he found them, as he himself said, “a reference to reality is the easiest thing, you just take what’s there.” (1) He felt a reluctance to interfere with the way the world presented itself. (2) Yet he achieved a melding of subject matter, a sense of the sitter’s presence with formal and compositional concerns. The environmental elements in the painting the piano, the doorway, the adjacent room assume the same importance as the figure. It is in the handling of the paint itself that Porter found “the life of the painting, its wholeness and its vitality.” (3)

In 1953, when this portrait was painted, Laurence, the middle of Porter’s three sons, was seventeen and preparing for college. Having a natural gift for the piano, Laurence was often found in this pose at home in Southampton. The view from the front hall where the piano was located extends into the living room where a partially visible Audubon print hangs above the fireplace. Porter often painted family members involved in quiet pursuits in their everyday surroundings. While he did infuse this scene with a degree of depth of meaning, he did not resort to unnecessary sentimentality. This characteristic of Porter’s portraits is sometimes interpreted as a certain detachment, but “Laurence at the Piano” does convey a subtle sense of domestic intimacy without idealization. The influence of Abstract Expressionism is apparent in the sensual enjoyment Porter felt in the manipulation of the paint. The gestural mode inherent in the active brushstrokes imparts a sense of spontaneity and immediacy to the person and the setting depicted in “Laurence at the Piano”.

JL

Bibliography:

Rackstraw Downes, ed., “Fairfield Porter: Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935-1975” (New York: Taplinger, 1979); Joan Ludman, “Fairfield Porter: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints” (Westbury, N.Y: Highland House, 1981); John Ashbery et al., “Fairfield Porter (1907-1975): Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction” (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982); John T. Spike, “Fairfield Porter: An American Classic” (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992); William C. Agee et al., “Fairfield Porter: An American Painter” (Southampton, N.Y: Parrish Art Museum, 1993).

NOTES:

. Porter, interview with Paul Cummings, transcript, June 6, 1968, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., p. 80.

2. Brian O’Doherty, “The Figurative Fifties: New York Figurative Expressionism” (New York: Rizzoli, 1988), p. 130.

3. William C. Agee, “Fairfield Porter from the Permanent Collection of the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York”, exhib. cat. (Southampton, N.Y.: Parrish Art Museum, 1996).