Throughout his life and since his death, Fairfield Porter had and maintains a large contingent of admirers made up of knowledgable painters, writers, critics, collectors and a few art historians.  The many citations included in this Commentary and throughout this website are intended to document that support.

Porter has been made to seem obscure because he has been ignored by museums. In recent years, however, these institutions have made an effort to reevaluate their programming and expand their audiences by promoting the work of women and artists of color.  Ideally,  that reevaluation of priorities will continue with recognition of Fairfield Porter’s achievement and the enduring importance of the art and craft of painting.

There is a more knowing grasp of the problems of color in Island Farmhouse than you will find in many pictures by artists who specialize in such problems and know nothing else.

Hilton Kramer, “Fairfield Porter: Recent Paintings,” The New York Times C (18 April 1970): 25.

Strange combinations of colors somehow convey the taste of reality. In Island Farmhouse, for example, the side of the house was underpinned a bright chrome yellow to represent the shadows, and the clapboards were then painted over this yellow surface in thick white streaks. Bright yellow shadows? Certainly a strange effect. Yet eccentric and unpredictable as they are, in Porter’s best paintings such manipulations of pigment and color somehow catch the authentic look and feel of things, going beyond knowledge of form to capture the immediacy of pure sensation.

Henry Adams, “Fairfield Porter: Why the Fuss,” Carnegie Magazine LVII (March-April 1984): 12-14.

To experience one of Fairfield Porter’s better pictures is to feel simultaneously the sudden reality of a specific place and time and, no less emphatically, the presence of a painting that has a life altogether its own, distinct from the circumstances it depicts. Consider Island Farmhouse, a major work of 1969…It has that all-at-onceness, that particular plenitude of sensation and association we recognize as his. It’s hard to say just what we notice first…Every element has its precise weight and degree of descriptive articulation.

We hardly notice Porter’s audacity in making the house’s shadows cadmium yellow…But we definitely do notice the peculiar intensity of that wall’s reflected light, as well as its sensation of nearness and its contrast to the lucid, sunlit space of distant trees, sea and sky that fairly crackles with clarity. The house’s two windows reflect just what we need to know of the space behind us, and they are also abstract reiterations of the palette that makes the distant view…The whole is, at once, completely familiar and utterly new.

Robert Berlind, “Fairfield Porter: Natural Premises,” Art in America 71 (September 1983): 136.

The foreground inventory from left to right reads magazine (?), glasses, book, face, sewing box, telephone, book. All are generalized except for the face and sewing box, which counterpose their specifics. But the face, however abstracted its gaze, sucks in our attention, for it particularizes in a test of things more generally seen. In the background, clock, mirror and books are delineated more as concepts. nothing is as general as the mood of the landscape seen through the window. The outrageous red stripes of the cloth on the table augment the sewing box in diverting our attention from the face. A formal matter—the red—is introduced to modify a psychological weight—the face. In modernism such dialectics were consciously implicit in the artist’s method. In this picture, the uneasy congress of the specific and the general generate a variety of ambiguities which deepen when examined. Here the subject rides on different modalities of vision and representation as they strive toward consistency to fulfill the illusion of style as late modernism conceived it. It is the artist’s awareness of these conflicts that certifies July Interior as a modern picture.

- Brian O’Doherty, “Fairfield Porter” in The Figurative Fifties: New York Figurative Expressionism, Paul Schimmel and Judith E. Stein, et al., Exh. cat. (Newport Beach, California: Newport Harbor Art Museum, 1988), 131.

As soon as the process of looking begins, the “subject” disappears, absorbed into the setting so that foreground and background are one. It is a matter of the kind of attention one pays. July Interior (1964) represents a woman with an unfocused gaze lying in bed. It is daytime, and the windows are open. A closed book, reading glasses and a sewing basket abandoned on the sheet indicate that the woman is sick. But once noticed, this aspect of the subject has hardly any more importance, or at most an ironic one, for his is not a painted “bedside visit,” and sympathy is not invited. But the sickroom is flooded with fine summer weather—to Porter reality is not a matter of sentiments but of sensations, and his artistry is all in the immediacy with which he presents them. Thus there is no proscenium arch around the scene. The viewer is inside the room with the threshold behind him (hence the often bumpy truncations of the lower edges of Porter’s pictures). Nor is there any logical or mathematical organization to the space; it is the space of awareness, the the lush greens of outdoors force their way into the room with the July air. And the personalities of objects break through any mechanically consistent perceptual or constructional system; it is their quiddity as sheen, transparency, flatness, detail, arabesque that Porter attends to and that can make his pictures ungainly at the same time as it makes them forceful.

- Rackstraw Downes, “Unrepeatable Days,” ARTnews 82 (April 1982): 96-97.

July Interior (1964) is a statement of more evident complexity. It is midday. A woman is lying on an unmade bed in a bedroom, surrounded by books, telephone, eyeglasses. Her head is at the center of the painting. From that point we move out in various directions. At right, out the window, is the July landscape. Beyond her body is a dresser. There are pictures, lamps, curtains, pink walls. The space is set up, one might say, by the great thrust of wall beginning at th lower right and pushing diagonally through the painting. But our experience of the painting denies this orthogonal: we go up and down, back and forth, over and around the figure. Our focus shifts from areas where objects are uninflected shapes to areas where the effects of light on surfaces—on dark, polished wood, on gold-colored metal—approach the singular truth of accidents in nature. Our experience of the painting moves between the opposing poles of depersonalized, undefined objects-as-shapes and highly personalized, intimately modulated objects-as-personalities. July Interior is a picture that touches on “big” questions: the nature of perception, of experience.

— Jed Perl, “Fairfield Porter,” Arts 54 (February 1980): 4.

Porter might be considered a typical case of American Know-Nothingness if it were not for his writing. With it, he links himself and his work to an intellectual tradition virtually as old as America itself: the conviction that spirit is immanent in, and reveals itself through, experience. Porter at work shares the heritage of transcendentalism, Walt Whitman, and John Dewey. Color is his vehicle into immanence.

Kay Larson  “Fairfield Porter’s Real-Life Pleasures”  New York   17 (18 June 1984): 76-77.

Abstract Expressionism

Porter isn’t exactly a household name, but many connoisseurs consider him one of the greatest American artists (and art critics) of the 20th century, an astonishingly original representational painter whose style fuses two seemingly disparate idioms: the intimate domestic realism of Bonnard and Vuillard and the excitingly free brushwork of Willem de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists.

Terry Teachout  The Wall Street Journal   Thursday, September 4, 2003

Why the current fuss over a painter who formerly attracted little attention? Because Porter, far from being a conventional realist, was the first painter to approach realism with a knowledge of the accomplishments of Abstract Expressionist painting. In fact the pretty subjects and pastel colors of Porter’s paintings can be somewhat misleading; by no means serene as a personality, the apparent casualness of his paintings was hard-won. Porter’s vision was actually less close to 19th-century American realists, such as Thomas Eakins, with their scientific, geometrically constructed conception of the world, than to that of the Abstract Expressionists, several of whom were personal friends. In particular, Porter’s paintings owe a great debt to Willem De Kooning, whose work he collected. De Kooning, for example, influenced his use of glurpy wet paint, smacked on with a thick, floppy brush, and his fondness for blond-pink and yellow color harmonies. Like the Abstract Expressionists, in his compositions Porter eschewed conventional arrangements. He was at his best as a painter of scatter—scudding clouds, stray branches, disarrayed dishes, and randomly placed people.

Henry Adams, “Fairfield Porter: Why the Fuss?”, Carnegie Magazine LVII (March-April 1984): 12.

If the New York School “triumphed” in the 1950s, it was owing in good part to the lucid critical writings of Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), whose stubbornly independent mind had been trained at Harvard by the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and in Florence by the Renaissance scholar Bernard Berenson.  Thus, even as he explained and extolled Abstract Expressionism, Porter was also developing into one of the best realist painters of his time.  To him, it was Vuillard, rather than Cezenne, who had “made of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of the museums,” the very kind of change that Porter hoped to work upon Abstract Expressionism, combining, as he believed Vuillard did, a “love of the medium” with a “love of visual reality” in order that the wholeness of the world might be felt in a uniquely modern way.  At the same time that his landscapes, still life, interiors, and portraits fully reflect the civilized Yankee domain inhabited by Porter, they also bloom as only such conventional motifs could in the hands of a technician whose fluency rivaled that of Velazquez or de Kooning, and whose incandescent palette radiates gold, orange, and green electrified by swatches of icy blue or lavender.

Modern Art  Sam Hunter  John Jacobs  Daniel Wheeler   p. 376

The typical Porter painting is made up of flat patches of color, loose at the edges, that coalesce into still lifes, figures, interiors and landscapes composed with the casual precision of a great photographer’s snapshot. (His brother, as it happens was the great photographer, Eliot Porter.)  What saves his paintings from mere prettiness is Porter’s sense…of the Henry Jamesian significant moment. He usually gets a picture that is both intriguing as a narrative and satisfying as an abstraction.”

“Life With the Proper Painter”  Peter Plagens  Newsweek v. 122  p. 53  July, 1993

The idea of painting what one sees is as commonplace as its application is rare. In actuality most representational painting derives largely from what is known about its subject and relies on conventional descriptive drawing to explain forms, and chiaroscuro to model them. Porter, by freeing himself of conventions of representation based on drawing and by giving color and paint more determinative roles, did find a way of painting what he saw. This sort of radical renunciation of explanatory devices in favor or unmediated visual experience is likewise found in Vermeer’s mature work, in Monet, and in Vuillard, who, for Porter, stood above Cezanne as the modern master.

— Robert Berlind, “Fairfield Porter at Hirschl & Adler,” Art In America 68 (February 1980): 133.

Porter is almost impossible to classify. Vuillard was a strong influence, and so were De Kooning and Marin and Velazquez and a contemporary Belgian painter named Van Hooten. Porter used northeast American light the way Homer and Hopper did. (He once told his wife that New York City light was the best in the world.) He was a kind of Impressionist and he was a kind of realist who used a lot of abstraction.

— Whitney Balliett, “The Art World: An Akimbo Quality,” The New Yorker 59 (14 March 1983): 143.

The subjective experience of spaces and things is everywhere in Porter, an artist we call “realist” only rather imprecisely. On a visit to his studio in 1967, this writer saw Porter’s painting Early Morning (1966). With its very low vantage point, it represented what Porter saw when he first woke up in the morning. He spoke of how man-made objects are often more animal than natural ones and remarked that furniture seems to have the quality of seeing you without looking. Here was an intimate and entirely subjective apprehension of the world which sounds more like the material for a Symbolist poem than a realist painting. (Porter, in fact, did make translations of Mallarme’s poems.) But pleasure in paradox may be at the core of Porter’s artistry, and the poetry in his paintings wears the expression of a blunt factuality.

— Rackstraw Downes, “Fairifeld Porter’s Unrepeatable Days,” Artnews 82 (April 1983): 98.

The surprising thing, indeed, is that Porter’s paintings manage to seem realistic, for their process of construction often runs quite contrary to that of the forms they represent. Distant objects, for example, are often painted over the object in front of them—the distant roof of a house on top of a foreground tree in front of it, or a blue patch of distant sky splashed on top of an area of green foliage. Strange combinations of colors somehow convey the taste of reality.

— Henry Adams, “Fairfield Porter: Why the Fuss?” Carnegie Magazine LVII (March-April 1984): 12-13.

Although Porter will certainly be esteemed for his probity and for his cultivation—his position is usually thought of as that of an accomplished conservative within a contemporary ambience—it is unlikely that the real sophistication of his underlying formality, a formality of a particular and unobvious kind beneath his surface felicity will be widely understood and appreciated. The general visual insensitivity of audiences and tastemakers alike and the low intellectual level of most contemporary critical discourse would appear to be against it, against realizing how actually radical his work is.

— Louis Finkelstein, “The Naturalness of Fairfield Porter” ARTS 50 (May 1976): 102-105.