Fairfield Porter 1907-1975

The artist and art critic Fairfield Porter, fourth son of the prominent Ruth and John Porter, was born in 1907 in Winnetka, Illinois, a town just outside of Chicago. The Porters spent their summers in Maine, and Porter later stated that “Maine [was his] home more than any other place, and [he belonged] there” (Fairfield Porter, quoted in Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction, 11). Porter’s parents, an architect (his father) and a poet (his mother), placed a heavy emphasis on an intellectual education, and Porter was raised to be “more scholar and critic” than someone who took inspiration and pleasure from the light, colors, and textures of the world around him. As such, Porter later “needed to disregard his education in order to free himself to paint” (Justin Spring, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art, 3). But Porter disregarded more than just his education. Porter was descended on both sides from prominent New England families but rarely spoke about his ancestry. This was in part because of his socialist-leaning politics, which were in direct opposition to identification with a hierarchical class structure, but also simply because he wished to be known for his art, rather than be defined by or recognized because of his background. But although Porter largely disavowed his rarefied family history, he was “as much a product of [it] as he was a rebel against it”–– Porter had a lifelong “deep respect for tradition” which is most noticeable in his art through his choice of classical compositions such as the landscape and still life (Spring, 2).

In tracing the path of Porter’s life, one gets the sense that it was spent in a perpetual state of searching. After attending Harvard, Porter spent time travelling the European continent, absorbing the art, culture, and politics primarily of Italy and Russia. In 1928, following his travels, Porter moved to New York City, where he enrolled at the Art Students League. All the while, Porter courted Anne Channing, a childhood acquaintance. After Fairfield and Anne married, they moved often: to Chicago, back to New York City, and finally, to the Southampton village on Long Island, New York. Together they had five children, the first of which, Johnny, was disabled. Given Porter’s initial “ambivalence towards fatherhood,” his family life was often strained, especially as the Porters realized their eldest son required attentive care. However, Fairfield eventually “took up parenting with enthusiasm,” and the love he had for his family is evident in his many paintings depicting Anne and their children (Spring, 91).

The knowledge that Porter “was of two minds about the home life he depicted so beautifully” is central to approaching his artwork. A fellow artist and friend of Porter’s, Jane Freilicher, observed that “an unfinished quality…was part of Fairfield’s aesthetic” and that “the same sort of casualness you find in the household you find in his paintings” (Freilicher quoted in Spring, 173). While this is true, it is perhaps only half of the picture. In Porter’s paintings, there is a high degree of sensuality, and of exploration. While his works do, as Freilicher writes, have an unfinished, casual quality, they also display Porter’s efforts to shed the tight-laced intellectualism of his parents. The more one looks at them, John Ashbery writes, “the less the paintings seem celebrations of atmosphere…but, rather, strong, contentious, and thorny” (Ashery quoted in Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter, 13). This is equally as true as Freilicher’s assessment of Porter. Having grown up in a family that did not value the expression of emotion, Porter struggled throughout his life to both understand and convey his feelings. His paintings thus emerge as an outlet for the emotions he could not otherwise communicate. The reason Porter’s works feel so true, so captivating, is because they are by nature paradoxical: at once soft, casual, and light-filled, but also complicated and truth-telling.

For much of his career, Porter saw himself as a failure. While it is true that he did not attain critical success until near to the end of his life, he was by no means the failure he considered himself to be. Rather, his work was largely misunderstood as a simple and faithful recording of the everyday when in truth, it was so much more. Porter’s work eventually received the recognition it was due and is now owned by such prestigious collections as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and many more.

Still Life (1959) is a wonderful demonstration of Porter’s sensual, painterly technique, as well as his mixing of the classical and the contemporary. Porter wrote that “the truest order is what you already find there… when you arrange, you fail” (Porter quoted in Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter, 13). Indeed, the basket of flowers shown in Still Life has the sense of being something found rather than assembled. The way in which the flowers are positioned is reminiscent of a garden or field–– it appears that they were placed in the basket in the same (dis)order of their growth. Furthermore, Porter’s colors are at their best in Still Life, vibrant greens, reds, yellows, and purples working together to form that naturalistic yet deliberate two-sidedness.

The poet and friend of Porter’s, John Ashbery, writes that Porter’s painting “has the vehemence of abstraction, though it speaks another language” (Ashbery quoted in Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter, 13). In Still Life, the passion that Ashbery refers to, the kind often associated with Porter’s abstract expressionist contemporaries, is on full display. This is in part due to Porter’s brilliant use of color, but also because Porter approached his subjects by “drawing the space around them” (John Bernard Myers, “Jottings from a Diary” in Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter, 45). This has the effect of emphasizing the shapes and forms of the primary subject. The result, though achieved through disparate means, is similar to that of abstraction, where the viewer is forced to see a familiar subject in an unfamiliar way. In the case of Still Life, the calculated shapes of the flowers and their purposeful arrangement afford a fresh take on an otherwise simple basket of flowers.

Porter wrote that “painting is a way of making the connection between yourself and everything” (Porter quoted in Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter, 60). Due to Porter’s complicated relationship with self-expression, this quote holds particularly true on a personal level. Painting was Porter’s primary method of articulating his feelings, a fact which makes his work all the more visually compelling; each painting is a glimpse into the mind of a brilliant, multi-faceted man. Painting was thus more than a career for Porter; it was just as much an essential facet of his personal life as it was his professional. Still Life is a wonderful example of Porter’s exploration of the self, a basket of flowers that is at once ordered and disordered, and above all, clearly imbued with his passion for art.