Willem De Kooning & Fairfield Porter

The friendship between Willem De Kooning and Fairfield Porter might seem improbable to those who have only a passing knowledge of their lives and careers. The supposed conflict between abstract and figurative painting would put them in opposing camps. But they were kindred spirits. For both men, the long history of Western European art was a lived reality that informed their work. They perceived European fine artists, past and present, as their mentors and colleagues. Both men had a profound respect for the complexity of skills that painters must master in order to create their art. De Kooning’s art and friendship provided Porter with insights that were essential to his maturation as a painter.

Of Americans I admire de Kooning most—very much—and I have learned a great deal from him. Though he is abstract, and I am not, still I use things, or have, that I first saw in his painting.

Letter to Arthur Giardelli May 25, 1958 Material Witness

Willem De Kooning was born into a working class family in the Netherlands. At the age of 12, he became an apprentice at the Gidding brothers’ acclaimed decorative painting firm that created elegant interiors for Rotterdam’s elite. Enraptured by every aspect of their workshop, he was happy to be employed there six days a week. His talent was immediately recognized. One year later he was painting at work sites.

Tuschinski Royal Theater, Amsterdam Completed 1921

The firm encouraged him to enroll in the prestigious Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques night school which he did. This early training and work experience had an effect similar to that of Fairfield Porter’s practice of copying paintings. In both instances these men were developing a visual vocabulary and muscle memory that they later used in their mature work as painters. They both had the utmost regard for high “professional standards” .

In this respect, De Kooning’s beginnings differed from those of many later artists, who grew up when becoming an artist was considered more a matter of temperament than of know-how. De Kooning began by learning the hows rather than the whys. His hand led his mind; and he always retained a fundamental sense of solidarity with artisans.

His lifelong passion for the sensuous curve—for bravura arabesques of the hand—may owe something to the sinuous lines that filled his eyes at the Gidding firm; and his unashamed celebration of painterly richness, especially the whipped-up surfaces and strange pastel tonalities in his art, may stem partly from the hothouse cultivations of the time.

de Kooning: An American Master Mark Stevens and Analyn Swan 2006  pp. 23 & 25

Given his talent, energy and ambition De Kooning could certainly have had a successful career as a decorative painter in the Netherlands. But he was fascinated by what little he knew about American culture and began to imagine the possibility of an exciting new life in the United States. In 1926 he stowed away on a ship bound for America. First he found a job painting houses in Hoboken, New Jersey. Then he moved to lower Manhattan where he was able to pick up work utilizing his skills as a commercial artist.

When the WPA Federal Arts Project was created, he applied and was hired to paint public art murals. Because of his experience with the Gidding brothers, he was comfortable with the process of designing and painting art on a large scale. After two years with the WPA Project he resigned for fear that his illegal immigrant status might be discovered. In 1938 he received a commission to design one section of a three-part mural, Medicine, for the Hall of Pharmacy at New York’s 1939 World’s Fair. Throughout this time he continued to work on his own paintings which were beginning to generate considerable interest in New York’s small downtown art world. But he made little effort to promote his own work. He was never satisfied with what he produced and found it almost impossible to declare a painting “finished”. Finally, in 1942, he was included in a group exhibition,“American and French Paintings” held at the McMillen Gallery and organized by John Graham.

De Kooning when I had met him…had been a young painter cheerfully in earnest living next door. He readily talked and listened, sitting forward on a chair. He admired Picasso enthusiastically. After a while one realized what it meant to him to be a painter. It didn’t mean being one of the boys, making the scene or leading a movement, it meant meeting full force the professional standard set by the great Western painters old and new.

Edwin Denby, Dancers, Buildings and People in the Street  Reprinted in Art In America  1945 - 1970    Editor Jed Perl

De Kooning was a regular visitor to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. One object of his admiration were the Roman murals displayed there.

Roman fresco from the villa at Boscoreale

Like Fairfield Porter, De Kooning was ready and willing to absorb ideas from any art that spoke to him.

In De Kooning: A Retrospective, John Elderfield writes regarding Woman 1948 that “…the effect of pictorial immediacy belies the complex methods that went into the work’s production.” The “…appearance of immediacy was a quality he worked long to achieve.”

Fairfield and Anne Porter moved back to New York from the Midwest in 1939. Soon thereafter friends from Chicago introduced them to artists and writers who had created an intellectual and artistic community in lower Manhattan. Willem De Kooning was an important presence in that community. When Porter met De Kooning and saw his paintings, he immediately recognized their significance. He wrote an article about De Kooning that he submitted first to Partisan Review and then The Kenyon Review. Both magazines rejected it because, at that time, De Kooning was “unknown”. Porter’s intellectual investment in De Kooning was matched by his willingness to offer financial support to this still struggling artist. Since college, Porter would buy art that he believed in. During the 1940s he bought at least three paintings from De Kooning.

In her memoirThe Loft Generation Edith Schloss describes encountering a De Kooning painting in Fairfield Porter’s home in New York:

Next to this John Marin was a mysterious long oil of a procession of starry-eyed ladies carrying odd vases. It was painted in the same pinks and blues of the walls of this house, but there were chinks of sour green and orange as well. The figures were unfinished, half wiped away, and everything looked vaguely ritualistic, a bit like a weathered Pompeiian mural. But the clash of colors and the ambiguity were completely modern. Later I found out that the puzzling little panel was a De Kooning.

In the summer of 1955, James Schuyler was traveling in Venice and visited the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. Included in that exhibition was Pink Lady, a painting owned by Porter.

“The one that belongs to you was one of the two I liked best.’”

Here Porter describes his response to an apparently “abstract” painting by De Kooning.

Bill de Kooning has painted some surpassingly beautiful abstractions—one in pink and yellow, with a blue window, which expresses my delight in June at the island—the blue for the sky and water, the yellow for the indian paintbrushes and the pink for the way you feel at the seacoast.

Fairfield Porter letter to Anne Porter [1942]

De Kooning’s formal education was limited since he had gone to work at the age of 12. This must have contributed to what has been described as “an exaggerated respect for a university education. He was especially attracted to philosophers and novelists with a philosophical or intellectual bent…”. Some “downtown” artists dismissed Fairfield Porter as a wealthy Ivy League dilettante. But De Kooning had great respect for him.

“With Fairfield talking you could have tape recorded his conversation for immediate publication. He never wasted a word and he liked to be controversial. I adored his outspokenness, his clarity of thought.” Willem de Kooning quoted in: "The Illuminated Palette" Judd Tully Horizon 25: 14-21, D. '82

I saw Bill de Kooning, who gave me the most flattering compliment—he wanted me to know that he had been, in his painting, influenced by my painting….

— Fairfield Porter Letter to Laurence Porter August 17, 1958

The friendship between Fairfield Porter and Willem De Kooning is a topic worthy of serious investigation, offering the possibility of new insights into the work of both these important artists.