“Fairfield Porter, the realist painter, art critic, and heroic eccentric…will be acknowledged as a major twentieth-century artist when we can figure out how.”
January 12 - March 13, 1983
The New York Times ran Fairfield Porter’s obituary under a headline that identified him as “… a Realist in an Age of Abstract Art”. A few years later, a similar phrase, “Realist Painter In An Age of Abstraction”, was the subtitle for a major posthumous retrospective. One reason this simple characterization of his career has persisted is that it appears to be self-evident. He made paintings based on observation of the world around him at a time when Abstract Expressionism was the most renowned style of American art. Also, the implication that he was out of sync with his era appeals to both sides of the 20th century art wars. Traditionalists could see him as the scrappy outsider who stood up against the avant-garde trends of his time. Scholars and curators who focused their careers on the “triumph” of abstraction could assume, without further investigation, that his art lacked intellectual rigor. Both sides failed to understand what he was about. To “figure out” how to give Fairfield Porter the recognition he so richly deserves, one must be willing to objectively reexamine the assumptions, of which there are many, that have grown up around his artistic identity.
“Conventional knowledge is usually based on some evident truth, above which is reared a superstructure of misunderstanding and fallacy.”
“I want only to paint better without theory. I think of William Carlos Williams, the American poet, saying, ‘No ideas except in things’.”
One definition of abstraction is “formation of an idea by mental separation from particular instances or material objects.” Assuming this to be the word’s meaning, it is correct to suggest that Fairfield Porter was out of sync with his era, an age of ideologies. Porter’s art was entirely focused on “particular instances” and “material objects.” In 1965 he wrote to a British friend: “I want only to paint better without theory. I think of William Carlos Williams, the American poet, saying, ‘No ideas except in things’.” Porter was adamantly opposed to the coercive force of “modern art dogma”. He believed in the paramount importance of artistic freedom. This liberated him as a painter and enabled him to be open minded as a critic. The quality he was looking for in art was vitality and it could be found in any style.
But obituary headlines and catalogue copy are written for the general public. In these instances, the word “abstraction” is almost certainly interpreted as simply referring to a non-objective style of painting, implying that this style was singularly dominant during the years that Fairfield Porter was pursuing his career as an artist. The historical record, however, reveals a more complicated reality. Porter’s short reviews, written for ARTnews between October 1951 and May 1959, document the wide range of styles to be seen in New York during that time. The art world was expanding rapidly in many different directions. Elaine De Kooning described the mid-1950s downtown art scene as “eclectic to the point of chaos”.
The Abstract Expressionists were quickly taking on the role of America’s “old masters” and a younger generation was nipping at their heels. Robert Rauschenberg erased a De Kooning drawing in 1953. Jasper Johns began his first flag painting in 1954. Pop Art and other “movements” were visible on the horizon. The art historian E. P. Richardson writes that the notoriety of abstraction was “…a dominance of critical enthusiasm and the art market, rather than of the actual practice of the arts…”. This is not a judgment about the quality of the paintings produced by the Abstract Expressionists. It is simply an acknowledgement that many other painters had successful careers at that time, producing work of high quality in a wide variety of styles. In this heterogeneous environment, Porter’s rise to prominence as a painter is no longer an inexplicable anomaly.
Also misleading is the simple description of Porter as a “realist”. General audiences as well as many art professionals assume that the goal of the realist is to document facts. But Porter strenuously objected to that approach to painting. He consistently criticized American painters for their compulsion to put everything in, attributing that tendency to a puritanical, over zealous conscience. This is a theme to which he returns often in his short reviews. The sensibility Porter was looking for in painting captured the essence of a subject rather than its mere appearance. He speaks to this distinction in one review, writing that the painter “…in his concern with the difference between reality and realism, favors reality. In the bouquet of flowers, it is their wildness that he is after.” How does one paint from life with this goal in mind? Porter never settled on a single method. In fact, this lack of settling was his solution.
“I don’t know what my paintings are until it’s too late. It’s always disastrous—if I’m writing or painting—to know ahead of time how it’ll come out. That has to be discovered.”
- Grace Glueck, "Nature with Manners," The New York Times (19 January 1969): 26
In December 1952 ARTnews published The American Action Painters by Harold Rosenberg. This article is a rambling meditation on a dramatic new trend in American art. Though it was well known that he particularly admired the work of Willem De Kooning, no individual artists are named. Rosenberg writes generally about a new approach to painting, identifying process and autobiography as fundamental aspects of “action painting”.
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act…What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.
A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist… The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.
Over time, phrases from this article became a kind of canonical text for the movement later identified as Abstract Expressionism. But Rosenberg was not dogmatic about the new trend in painting that he describes. Near the beginning of his article he writes: “What makes any definition of a movement in art dubious is that it never fits the deepest artists in the movement…” Nothing in his article precludes the possibility of a figurative painter also being an “action painter”. His definition might very well be valid, but, for “the deepest artists”, the fit is just not as obvious.
As much as any painter of his generation, Porter sought to break down the distinction between art and life. His subject was family, friends and the physical environment in which he and they lived. His goal was to capture his “immediate experience” of this world in the act of painting. Over the course of his lifetime he was continually working to develop his painting skills so that he could respond with specificity and spontaneity when confronting daily life as his primary subject. According to Elaine de Kooning the term “action painters” was an idea that “…had simply been kicking around the art world for some years and people knew then it didn’t exactly mean style. It meant an attitude.” Set aside style as the primary marker of significant art in the middle of the 20th century, replace it with “attitude” and suddenly the path to recognizing Fairfield Porter opens up. His willingness to embrace uncertainty was very much in keeping with the spirit of his time. If Fairfield Porter is studied with the understanding that he was in fact an “action painter”, all of the many divergent elements of his body of work begin to make sense.
To say that attitude was more important than style might seem like a radical revision of history. But additional evidence supporting Elaine De Kooning’s recollection can be found in the commentary of another eyewitness to New York’s art world at mid-century. Meyer Schapiro’s essay The Liberating Quality of Avant-Garde Art is less well known than Rosenberg’s “action painting” article. But it is an equally valuable delineation of the intellectual landscape surrounding Porter and his contemporaries. This is Schapiro’s opening statement:
In discussing the place of painting and sculpture in the culture of our time, I shall refer only to those kinds which, whether abstract or not, have a fresh inventive character…
When his essay was first published in 1957 “advanced” art had not yet been limited to an abstract style.
Schapiro places his topic within a broad historical context. While doing so he also notes the difficulty faced by critics who are trying to make sense of these developments.
The change in painting and sculpture may be compared to the most striking revolutions in science, technology and social thought. It has affected the whole attitude of painters and sculptors to their work. To define the change in its positive aspect, however, is not easy because of the great diversity of styles today even among advanced artists.
Explaining the concept of avant-garde art to Americans was hard enough without the added complication of explaining how it might manifest itself in a variety of painting styles. The narrative was later simplified. In his revelatory collection of essays, Cultural Amnesia, Clive James astutely observed that “The polemicist has the privilege of unifying his tone by leaving out the complications.” In 1978 Meyer Schapiro’s article was re-published in a collection of his essays. Its new title was Recent Abstract Painting.
Just as it was difficult to define the avant-garde, so too is it difficult to pin down the parameters of “The New York School.” The phrase was first coined as a rejoinder to “The School of Paris.” Prior to World War II, the French capital had been the center of the international art world. When the war disrupted this Parisian dominance New York had an opportunity to take the lead. Of course neither phrase referred to an actual school. They were, instead, distinct historical moments. Cosmopolitan cities attracted talented artists who arrived with various skills and aesthetic points of view. This produced a synergy that resulted in a burst of creative innovation. Art historians have consistently recognized the diversity of the art produced by “The School of Paris”. But the story of “The New York School” has been abbreviated to include only one type of painting. With reference to the visual arts, the phrase is now assumed to be a synonym for Abstract Expressionism.
There is, however, another “New York School”, a small coterie of poets who rose to prominence in the 1950s. Determinations of membership in this group typically focus on a particular “attitude” as the fundamental requirement. This is the Poetry Foundation’s description of that “school”:
Though stylistic diversity existed within the group, New York School poetry tended to be witty, urbane, and conversational. The poets allowed everyday moments, pop culture, humor, and spontaneity into their work, seeking to capture life as it happened…The cross-pollination between writing and visual art was a hallmark of the New York School.
Abstract expressionist painters are then identified as the artists who “collaborated and socialized” with these poets. But Fairfield Porter is a more apt example. He was close friends with John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch. Their professional and personal lives were intertwined. And Porter, more than any other painter of his generation, focused his art on the goal of capturing life as it happened. Combining the literary and visual interpretations of “The New York School” creates a more expansive view, one that can easily accommodate the presence of Fairfield Porter.
In the 1950s ARTnews published a recurring feature in which a writer and photographer visited the studio of an artist in order to document the artist’s working method. In January 1955 the magazine published Porter Paints a Picture written by the poet Frank O’Hara with photographs by Rudy Burckhardt. The article recorded aspects of Porter’s process as he painted Portrait of Katharine (Katie in an Armchair) 1954. As O’Hara approaches the end of his article he quotes a remarkable testimonial regarding the relationship of Porter’s art to that of his contemporaries.
Speaking of Porter when this and other pictures of his were exhibited in a group show at Easthampton this summer, a Dante scholar and aficionado of contemporary painting remarked: “It is very clear and strong, this sensibility, but not just that. Seen here, along with others of the New York School, it is not at variance with any principle; it is distinct but not argumentative; and one can see it advancing into the future, not subject to decay.”
The idiosyncratic style of this commentary is intriguing. Though it would be interesting to know who made these remarks, identifying the speaker is not essential. O’Hara clearly found the assessment credible and it continues to ring true.
Fairfield Porter was fully engaged with the most vital artistic and philosophical debates of his day. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the innovations in American painting that blossomed at mid-century. At the same time, he embraced the long tradition of Western European painting and the craftsmanship that made that tradition possible. Balancing these apparently contradictory impulses contributed to the distinctive vitality of his art. After years of effort applied to mastering the craft of painting, he was ultimately able to achieve his goal, to capture in paint his “immediate experience” of the world. Porter’s life, art and criticism offer an abundance of riches for study by future scholars. He deserves to be recognized as one of the great masters of American art. This website is my contribution to the process of figuring out how to make that happen.
“It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it. ”