The fourth of five children born to James and Ruth Porter, Fairfield Porter grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, just north of Chicago. His father’s mother had owned the land that later became Chicago’s Loop area, and the Porters were very comfortable; Fairfield never had to work, except for some years in the forties. His chief artistic influence as a child was his father, who was an architect and had built the Greek Revival house they lived in. His father loved Italian pictures and placed photographs of famous paintings and buildings and plaster casts of Greek sculpture all over the house. There were trips abroad to the great picture galleries of Europe and Fairfield developed personal opinions about art and the history of painting by the time he was fourteen. His next big artistic influence was Harvard University, where he studied art history. Later he singled out Arthur Pope and his course, “Drawing and Painting and Principles of Design,” as having been especially important to him. Also he absorbed, as did everyone at Harvard in those years, the aesthetics of Bernard Berenson. It was at Harvard (or possibly even before) that Porter decided to become a painter. Upon graduating, he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York. Just how excited Porter had gotten about art comes across in this description of him by a contemporary, Frank Rogers:  

I must tell you of a most enjoyable meeting this afternoon…His name is Porter his first name I’ve forgotten. What enthusiasm! We yelled. We laughed. We argued. He told me about glazing [a process of painting]; El Greco and Rubens used it he says. We talked about painters and both agreed that Rubens was wonderful, having thought him rotten in America. It was all pell-mell, fast and furious. I loved it. And I like this fellow Porter very much. I think I’ll write him. You would like him immensely. He’s so enthusiastic — the only person I know of as enthusiastic on art as I am — the only one…This crazy nut is going from Italy to Russia (he’s trying to learn Russian now). He wants to see what Communism is like… Life is really fine, Katherine. I wonder what this fellow, Porter, will ever do. He’s got lots of talent and appreciation of the old masters. If he doesn’t let his intellectual side carry him away, he’ll be good.  

 This confidence and intense love of art doesn’t appear in Porter’s paintings for almost thirty years. Born in 1907, he was of the same generation as many of the Abstract Expressionists, most of whom he knew. He decided to become a painter early and painted throughout his whole life. But he didn’t become noteworthy until the 1950s. Porter did major work only during the last twenty years of his life. The fact that Porter’s art blossomed very late is even more surprising when he tells us that he discovered how he wanted to paint as early as 1938, the year he saw an exhibition of Vuillard and Bonnard at the Art Institute of Chicago: “When I was young I thought I ought to paint like the Old Masters but it didn’t interest me very much. Then Chicago I saw a big show of Vuillard and Bonnard. The Vuillards first seemed so helplessly obvious. I thought to do it! And I did.”  

Porter’s discovery of modern art was the discovery of Impressionism. He believed that “the Impressionist revolution implied that the value of art was intrinsic, and that this was much more of a revolution than anything that succeeded it,” as Rackstraw Downes has put it. To Porter, the formal essence of Impressionism was that paint and color, rather than contour and shading, give substance; “the contour was unimportant relative to the interior light, substance and weight it contains,” In other words, for Porter, Impressionism was the painterly way of re-creating the presence of reality. Porter thought that Vuillard represented the “natural” fulfillment of Impressionism. He liked Vuillard better than Bonnard, and he liked Vuillard’s later work more than his early “Nabis” period pictures. This is the same taste that was so taken by two pictures of Velázquez shown at the Metropolitan Museum right after the war. Velázquez became his favorite painter.  

I was beginning to be interested in what you can do with paint — what is the quality of paint, what is its nature, and I admired the liquid surface of Velázquez. And what might be called his understatement, though I don’t like that word. The impersonality — I don’t know what word to use. He leaves things alone. It isn’t that he copies Nature; he doesn’t impose himself upon it. He is open to it rather than wanting to twist it. Let the paint dictate to you. There’s more there than there is in willful manipulation. I used to like Dostoevsky very, very, very much. Now I prefer Tolstoy for the same reason. He is like Velázquez for me.  

 Porter saw in both Vuillard and Velázquez sovereign artistic personalities who were able to balance their love of the medium and their love of visual reality in such a way as to respect the inherent individuality of both. Here is Porter’s ideal, “a strong man without egoism,” as he once wrote of John Button. It explains why he liked Vuillard better than Bonnard. For Bonnard’s wayward and equivocal brushing imposes itself, however passively, on the structure of reality. Porter didn’t like deliberate distortions, which he called “affectation,” just as he didn’t like bravura, which he called “performance.” The post-Impressionists, and especially Cézanne, seemed to him to have imposed themselves too much on the individuality and structure of nature, and he felt their art represented a falling off from the Impressionists and Vuillard. In fact, Porter usually saw the whole period from Cézanne to World War II in negative terms. He felt it had been too “conceptual,” too involved with ideas. According to Porter, it is only with Abstract Expressionism that we again have a kind of painting like Impressionism that is both empirical and respectful of its means. This was Porter’s reading of modern art. He felt that it was Vuillard, not Cézanne, who had “made of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums.” “Vuillard organized Impressionist discoveries about color and pigments into a coherent whole.” Or Vuillard was more “coherent and orderly” than Monet. Now it can be said that more than Cézanne or Bonnard or Monet, Vuillard, especially the later Vuillard, kept to traditional perspective and drawing. He was innovative, fresh, and personal, mostly in his handling of paint and in his unusual sense of color. Something like this could be said about Porter, too; he experienced what we think of as Vuillard’s conservatism, a respect for the wholeness, uniqueness, and presence of the world.  

That Porter was so struck by Vuillard’s “firmness and wholeness” has to do, I think, with his early experiences with Old Master painting and his training at Harvard’s Fogg Museum, which was then permeated by Renaissance ideals and classical aesthetics. When studying with Arthur Pope or reading Bernard Berenson’s books, Porter’s taste for traditional structure and pictorial decorum was probably first confirmed. An emphasis on structure and traditional composition was also part of Benton’s teaching at the Art Students League. Vuillard and Velázquez showed him that the modern equivalent was to use this traditional structure to create a new visual unity that gives the emphasis to light and the physical properties of oil paint. What could be more natural? Indeed, Porter’s approach is really an extension of nineteenth-century naturalism: nature and its given order are exploited for the sake of art.  

 Porter saw himself as discovering Vuillard’s great importance and developing his approach further. Only in his last years, and only in a few pictures, did he start to become as broad and arbitrary as Matisse or Milton Avery. Never did he willfully distort or break with a perceived reality. (I’m, of course, talking about his general conception, not details and areas, which can become very abstract indeed.) What Porter wrote about Jane Freilicher can be said of himself: “… when she has to choose between the life of the painting and the rules of construction, she decides to let the rules go. The articulation of some of the figures is impossible and awkward, and though this is a fault, it is a smaller fault than murder.” This quote shows a willingness to depart from received, traditional structure when it is necessary for aesthetic wholeness, but it also shows a great respect for this same structure.  

Another reason for Porter’s respect for structure is that it didn’t come easily to him. Later, Porter would complain that there wasn’t anyone to teach him about painting. His teachers at the Art Students League, Robinson and Benton, were both dry and graphic. Nowhere did he find a direct, sensuous, full-bodied approach to the medium of oil painting. “I don’t think anyone in America knew how to paint in oils at the time.” There had been beginnings by the American Impressionists, and especially by Robert Henri and John Sloan, but, as Porter never tired of pointing out, the Armory Show cut off these promising developments and diverted energies into different channels. French painterly naturalism never had an uncompromising representative this country. Even with Homer and Sargent or the early Sloan, there is a predominance of extra-painterly, usually illustrational, concerns and a consequent lack of that balanced concentration on the medium and on nature that Porter spoke of.  

Perhaps a lack of precedents and teachers (or models) helps explain the primitive character we find so often in Porter’s work. There is awkwardness, stiffness, even woodenness most noticeable in his figures (especially from the waist down) that can give a naive flavor to a scene, often hurting the picture. Then, there is his over diligent, even provincial sense of finish in his oils, which (if not as pronounced as in Milton Avery’s case) is never wholly overcome. Porter complained that he had to learn to paint from scratch, and America’s lack of a developed painting culture may also help to explain why he was such a “late bloomer.” He was drawn to a kind of painting that wasn’t available this country until after the war (and then in the form of abstract art). Before the war Porter’s art is tepid and dim. It looks like the work of a gifted but diffident amateur. His father, who hadn’t continued as an architect, didn’t provide him an example of ambition or even of an abiding interest but, still, where was that confident and passionate young man that Frank Rogers met in Italy? Here is how Porter himself explained his slow and feeble start. He wrote to the painter Arthur Giardelli in January of 1958:  

I now have five children: three sons…and two daughters. Their names are: John, Laurence, Jerry, Katharine and Elizabeth. John was sick from birth with a mysterious illness that was never quite understood, but seems to be a failure of development of his nervous system…He seems simple minded—he remains childish and can’t take care of himself quite, so he lives on a farm in Vermont where his foster parents keep schizophrenics and such like [meaning Johnny] free from responsibilities. It wasn’t until about seven years ago that we arrived at this solution. [Following that decision] I began to have a career or life of my own. This started by my getting a job on Art News, from which followed the possibilities of exhibitions for me, and at last, recognition for me as a painter. It wasn’t until after the war that I could concentrate on painting. That means paint without thinking of my supposed failure as a father in this one case.  

 Porter had undergone psychoanalysis in the middle forties and the realization he speaks of here was probably one result. He pointed to his over scrupulous conscience as having hampered him. Interestingly enough, this recalls the thesis of a book Porter wrote about Thomas Eakins some years later. The tone of the book is critical and negative. According to Porter, Eakins suffered from “a rigidity that followed from fulfilling the demands of an inorganic conscience” that held him back until the very end of his life. “It required him to think that beauty must be justified. It is paid for in difficulties, it is justified in scrupulousness in conformity to nature; things must be finished, accurate. Because his father’s money enabled him not to have to work for a living, he had to convince his conscience that painting was work.” Porter saw Eakins’s scientific preoccupations as efforts to make art into something he could justify as work. For Porter, Eakins’s genuinely painterly instincts were in conflict with his conscience.  

 There may be more than just a little projection or identification here. In the thirties Porter was preoccupied with politics, and throughout his life he felt the need to justify the artist’s profession to himself and others. He had to contend with an overactive intellect and an overactive conscience, just like Eakins. So at the very end of his life, when he was doing his most innovative work, he could still play with the idea of giving up painting to devote himself full-time to organic gardening or to the nuclear disarmament movement. Somewhere, Porter seems to have felt that painting was too selfish an occupation, and that entering into it in a wholehearted way was somehow self-indulgent. As if to remind himself, Porter once wrote “ideally conscience is directed toward the difficulty of achieving artistic integrity.” To affirm the sensual, full-bodied painting that he loved best meant for him a struggle. This helps explain why he was so slow to react even after he was stimulated by post-war developments and a new, more sympathetic context. Only slowly, Porter let himself be carried away by art again. But once he got going, his work continued to gain in freedom, richness, flexibility, and full-bodiedness. To the very end, there is an increase in riskiness, clarity, and grace.  

Until he began to write for Art News Porter was relatively isolated, at least from other artists. His writing helped him focus himself and reviewing regularly put him in constant contact with other artists, critics, and dealers. Porter was entering the New York art world at exactly the time when the New York School, the Abstract Expressionists, were about to gain ascendancy and even world leadership. Seeking to emulate them, a new generation of artists had collected in New York, and some of them opened cooperative galleries on 10th Street. The contemporary art scene was about to take a quantum leap in size and popularity. Porter became part of this exciting, ambitious, and mostly younger crowd. Gaining visibility and meeting sympathetic artists who liked his pictures, he got into the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, one of New York’s most respected avant-garde galleries.  

 Willem de Kooning, whom Porter had met in the 1930s, was his most important influence at this time. He was the one member of the older generation who continued to refer to the figure tradition, and he was the most accessible and available to the younger artists. The chef d’ecole of 10th Street and a charismatic personality, de Kooning seemed to Porter the prototype of the European painter still in touch with the great traditions of Europe. Even when de Kooning’s work became bombastic and grotesque in the early 1950s, miles away from the “understatement” and “naturalness” that Porter loved in Vuillard and Velázquez, de Kooning still impressed him. If Porter saw Impressionism through the eyes of the Renaissance, he saw de Kooning through the eyes of Vuillard. He couldn’t understand the abstract art that was developing around him in those years, although he was much conditioned by the climate and ideas that it generated. De Kooning especially influenced his ideas and helped him to be bolder. To Porter, de Kooning’s pictures were an illustration of an outlook, an affirmation of “the means so as to say painting is physical and material — a reality itself.” Moreover, de Kooning made “an attitude toward work the subject matter of his art.” His aggressive, full-bodied assertion of the value of painting as painting helped give Porter confidence in himself.  

A more physical approach to the medium (or to “work”) meant a larger surface and a bigger stroke. This forced Porter to see in broader masses. Another important change was the high key of his color. This, too, was characteristic of much of the abstract painting he was seeing, although Porter’s soft, warm, dry, bright light owes as much to Tiepolo (whom he copied) as to any contemporary pictures. Basically, his impressionist way of working remained the same; he just scaled it up and brightened it. He seems to have gotten an added push in this from a number of the younger 10th Street painters who were working along similar lines: Alex Katz, John Button, Larry Rivers, and Jane Freilicher. Porter was confirmed and challenged by their work (and influenced them in turn).  

 Once Porter began to raise his sights, his conservatism and reticence became his greatest assets. For if this was a period of great excitement and growth in American art, it was also one of great confusion. The American artist asserted himself and finally won a place in American society. But during this same period many artists lost their way through over-assertion. This was true of most of the 10th Street painters like Rivers and Katz, and it became true even of de Kooning after 1950. Pretentious over-assertion became the main expressive feature of much of the American contemporary art that followed in de Kooning’s wake (e.g., Pop or Minimal Art). Porter’s tact and traditionalism were a positive advantage in this context. He took a long time to become assertive and he never overdid it. Once he started to be bolder, his taste, his intelligence, and his traditional pictorial instincts helped make him the best realist of his generation and one of the finest we have had since the war.  

Despite Porter’s early attraction to Vuillard, it was only after 1950 that Vuillard’s influence becomes strongly visible in his work. We see it most in the comfortable, bourgeois domesticity of interiors: the way he used the horizontals and verticals of the room as well as the central table to organize the whole; the way he scattered objects across a table top or placed a figure behind it or a lamp above it; the way he liked to play with views through doors and windows. But never is there a self-conscious reference to Vuillard or any older master. We can see in Porter what he said of John Button: “He is a realist, and you do not feel the comparisons with the past or present tradition as relevant since originality is not proclaimed; the only way to regard his painting is as though here painting begins again.”  

 For the most part, Vuillard taught him how to be natural. (“What I like about Vuillard is that what he is doing seems to be ordinary, but the extraordinary is everywhere.”) Porter adopted Vuillard’s full, traditional range of subject matter: landscapes, interiors, still life, and portraits. As with Vuillard, these are always chosen from the familiar and close at hand; his family and friends appear in the figure pieces; the landscapes are of Long Island, where he lived, or Great Spruce Head Island in Maine, where he spent his summers. Never do we get “studio” subjects like the set-up still life or the posed nude. He wanted to avoid the prepared or arranged look. His figures are relaxed but still and quiet, posed or semi-posed and flat-footed. Everything is natural, normal, and as straightforward as possible. The psychology aimed at is always direct, warm, and uncomplicated. The real subject matter is the entire scene and its peculiar effect of light. This subject matter conspires with his sense of form to create the bright “impersonality” and “understatement” of his mature work. The picture has its opacities and densities (its structure), but it is also delicate, soft, and luminous. Porter’s color, which had been pallid and dim in the 1940s, is now his strong suit. His soft, pale hues become the freshest and most distinctive feature of his art. They go with his taste for dry, matte surfaces and a rough, “artless” touch.  

 In certain very late pictures, Porter started to cross the border between Impressionism and fauvism, between a reaction to natural light and a search for invented color. Examples include Beginning the Fields, Sun Rising out of the Mist, and Violet Sky, where the colors are salmon, violet, peach, and pink. Or he could become sharply acidic, as in Under the Elms, a picture that especially engaged him. Porter’s drawing is never as willfully inventive as this, but it, too, becomes progressively freer. In his later years, he said that his art history training at Harvard had held him back as regards drawing and composing. Art wasn’t first of all a question of rhyming or ordered relations (i.e., of harmony) but of spontaneity and life.  

Despite the fact that Porter’s main artistic attitude is French or “Mediterranean,” his mature paintings ask to be considered in the context of American art. Most obviously, they relate to that American realist tendency we find in Homer and Hopper. Porter once criticized Eakins for his lack of outdoor light and it is, above all, the outdoor light that relates Porter to Homer and Hopper: flat, hard, and clear, it is northeastern light, which Porter once complained about, saying it was boring. (He also called it “knife-like.”) It is not that Porter was influenced by Homer or Hopper, but that all three were American realists who found the same thing. With Porter, this light was explored for its own sake and for what it did to color. Porter made this light softer and warmer and he gave up more to the sensual properties of paint; he was more French. Still, compared to the French — to, say, Vuillard — Porter seems tight, crisp, cool, and spacious. His light is more brilliant, his colors contain more white. Earlier American followers of French Impressionism made of it something narrower and smaller. Porter made it something rougher, brighter, broader, and more distinctively American. He saw his surroundings through the medium of paint and so became a “painter’s painter,” admired for the boldness and sensitivity visible in the aesthetic choices, especially the handling, color, tone juxtapositions, and “weights.” This is very much what Porter’s pictures are about. For all of their tact and understatement, Porter’s mature paintings can be very bold when it comes to painterly values. His pictures seem ordinary, “but the extraordinary is everywhere.”  

By Kenworth Moffett, Contributing Writer