Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality was first published in 1929. This challenging book delineated his analysis of the nature of the universe. Here is one summary of his thesis: “…the fundamental nature of reality is not static, but rather a continuous process of becoming.”  Another author describes Whitehead as presenting “…a complex metaphysical system that … offers a new perspective on the interconnectedness of all things.” His book provoked considerable excitement among scholars. The difficulty of the book made it unsuitable for the general public. But the essence of his radically new thinking soon emanated to wider audiences.

In The Culture of Spontaneity, Daniel Belgrad writes that “It was from the writings of Alfred North Whitehead…that the avant-garde culled their ideas of the human and social implications of the new physics.” This is the source of references to “energy fields” that began to appear in explanations for new styles of American abstract painting. The extent to which artists actually understood the origins of their arguments is debatable.  Meyer Schapiro referred to the musings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko as “night school metaphysics”.  Nevertheless, these ideas were powerful motivators for the artists and later became the foundation of an expansive literature that valorized abstract painting. Process and spontaneity were themes that permeated that discourse and were easily linked to the work of Jackson Pollock or Willem De Kooning. It was less easy to see that process and spontaneity were equally essential to the artistic practice of Fairfield Porter. His interpretation of Whitehead’s ideas is more complicated but more credible given that he had actually read the philosopher’s books and interacted with the man himself.

The British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) left England in 1924 to accept a position in Harvard University’s department of philosophy. This physical relocation coincided with a transition in his intellectual life. His earlier work had focused on mathematics and the philosophy of science. His new professional interest was metaphysics. Whitehead was a renowned philosopher whose arrival on campus caused a stir, at least among those with an interest in philosophy. The Porter family was interested.  Ruth Porter referred to him as “the new prophet” at Harvard.  In his biography Fairfield Porter a life in art, Justin Spring writes:

The excitement over Whitehead was family wide; the Porters eventually had all Whitehead’s books with them on Great Spruce Head.

Fairfield Porter also arrived at Harvard in 1924.  During his Junior year he took Whitehead’s class entitled Philosophical Presuppositions  of Science.  More than forty years later Porter recalled: “…I took a course with Whitehead in philosophy that was very, very interesting.” This experience might have been an originating influence on his critiques of the role of technology in modern life. He wrote long essays on that topic in the 1960s. In 1975 he gave a lecture at Yale entitled Technology and Artistic Perception in which he refers to what he had been told about Bertrand Russell “by a professor of philosophy”. That professor must have been Whitehead. Porter graduated from Harvard in 1928, prior to the publication of Process and Reality. But it is certain that any course Whitehead was teaching during his first years at Harvard would reflect aspects of such a monumental work. Porter continued to read Whitehead’s books throughout his life. The philosopher profoundly influenced Fairfield Porter, the painter and the critic.

Whitehead’s belief in “the interconnectedness of all things” closely parallels Porter’s explanation for his motivation as a painter. In 1968 when he was asked: “Do you think that painting is more of an emotional expression than an intellectual one?” Porter responded:

No.  I don’t think it’s more emotional or more intellectual.  I think it’s a way of making the connection between yourself and everything.  You connect yourself to everything that includes yourself by the process of painting.

He went on to say that, as an artist,  “…you are not in control of nature quite; you are part of nature.” His paintings are a record of the process of making the connection between himself and reality.

Assuming that Jacques Barzun is correct when he describes great criticism as “autobiography enlarged” it is reasonable to look to Porter’s criticism for insight into his work as a painter. In one short review Porter speculated that an artist was trying “…to do something that is close to impossible: to express in paint a feeling about the world which has a philosophical equivalent.” This seems like a fitting summary of his own intention. In this case, the artist he was discussing was an abstract painter. But Porter wanted to retain the look of the observable world in his paintings, making the goal even more “impossible.” In a review of the exhibition The Figurative Fifties Dan Hofstadter has aptly noted:

Porter knew how to dream in paint as well as any of the Abstract Expressionists, and in fact his automatisms in representation are more deeply interesting than their abstract automatisms, because, unlike theirs, his go against the grain of what he was doing.

All paintings reflect a continuous series of actions.  Those can take place within a very brief time frame, maybe only a few hours.  Or a painter might struggle with a single painting for months if not years. Pollock  and De Kooning seemed to most obviously exemplify “action” painting.  But De Kooning’s method was painfully slow.  Long stretches of contemplation were interrupted intermittently with a sequence of fluid brush strokes.  Pollock did, on occasion, work with complete spontaneity. But that was not always his method. Fairfield Porter also worked in a wide variety of ways. He used direct and indirect methods. He often painted quickly. But other times he worked slowly. Paintings he began in Maine might be completed in his Southampton studio. Even more extreme was his decision to come back twenty years later to work again on a painting of his son Jerry. It was Porter’s mastery of technique that allowed him to continually adapt his methods to suit the subject at hand.

Fairfield Porter has not been well served by American art historians and curators. It’s ironic that so many of them have characterized him as unchallenging or backward looking or out of sync with his era when, in fact, what he was trying to do was wildly ambitious and very much in keeping with the spirit of his time.

Porter’s links to Whitehead would certainly be an important though formidable topic for future art historians to investigate. A more accessible topic is what seems to be an obvious link between Porter and American Transcendentalism. Not long before he died, Porter summarized his artistic intent in a conversation with the painter Louis Finkelstein.

Late last spring this painting figured importantly in a conversation I had with Porter in the course of which he represented his most overriding concern to be the transfiguration of the commonplace.

The Naturalness of Fairfield Porter Louis Finkelstein ARTS May 1976: 102-105