In 1997 the Museum of Modern Art organized an exhibition entitled Objects of Desire: The Modern Still Life. Reasonably enough the show begins with Cézanne.  Beyond that, however, its trajectory seems completely unpredictable unless one is aware of the ideological lens through which painting was assessed in the second half of the 20th century.   

After Cézanne MOMA’s survey skips to Magritte and then to Jasper Johns.  Magritte’s still life painting represents surrealism. Johns is placed in the category of Pop art which is described as a new art wave that rejected “…the formal, technical, and semantic systems of the past.”  After Pop, the next movement recognized is “Postmodern Simulacra.”  Clarification of the meaning of “modern still life” was obviously necessary.  Thus, the curator states:  “the modern still life is understood here as the avant-garde still life”,  an important aspect of which is the desire to challenge “the conventions of middle-class private life.” 

Not everyone was convinced that still life painting should be assessed in this way.  One critic found the omission of so many well known still life painters to be “startling.”   After naming many of those missing artists, including Fairfield Porter, the writer concludes: “all of them are painters, not jesters, and this is a show that finally seems less involved with charting a genre of painting than in marking its demise.”   Once ideas displaced knowledge of craft and tradition as the primary motivating force in American art, painting's demise was almost assured, at least within the precincts of America’s dominant fine arts institutions.

Throughout the 20th century, the subjects American artists chose “to impress people” obviously changed.  Morris Davidson identifies “seductive nudes” and “crowds” as the preferred signifiers of artistic ambition in the 1930s.  By the end of the century, curators had generally decided that “important” art was necessarily political, thus MOMA’s decision to select still life paintings based on their perceived challenges to “the conventions of middle-class private life”.  In recent years the most dominant political themes are typically identified as “issues of race and gender”.   Assessing an artist’s mastery of the  “plastic poetry” of the art of painting is never mentioned.

Multiple generations of art professionals have been trained in such a way that they no longer recognize the mental and physical skills required to make great paintings. Not surprisingly, they are not motivated to educate themselves about the craft. Without that knowledge, they have no basis upon which to assess quality in painting. Instead, they judge paintings solely in terms of the meaning they attribute to the identifiable imagery that they have named. 

The French philosopher Étienne Gilson (1884-1978) described this phenomenon in a series of lectures he gave at the National Gallery of Art in 1955.

The impossibility of translating forms and colors into words has surprising consequences, the most common one of which is that art historians sooner or later have to eliminate their hero and to substitute their own work for his.  Such is particularly the case with the endless descriptions of “subjects” in which these writers willingly indulge because it is for them an interesting exercise of virtuosity in artistic transposition; but the result is the literary description of a scene, not the description of a painting.

Gilson’s lectures were first published in 1959. The book, Painting and Reality, is still in print, indicating that there continues to be an audience for his work.  But it is unlikely that art historians make up a large part of that audience.  As his comments above suggest, his own approach to studying painting is far removed from the “literary” approach of so many art historians.

In his preface, Gilson writes that his “…conclusions will be found to arise at the meeting point of two entirely different disciplines metaphysics and the concrete reality of the painted works of art.” He describes his topic as an effort to interpret “…the evolution of the art of painting, especially that of its most recent phase, in the light of the classical metaphysics of being.”  This topic sounds daunting. But Gilson’s book is surprisingly approachable, perhaps because it began as a series of lectures. The perspective of this metaphysician offers rare insight into the art of still life painting. Gilson asserts that, in still life painting, the artist creates “plastic forms” that are a revelation of “the act of being”.

Étienne Gilson and Alfred North Whitehead first met in 1921. Each man immediately recognized a congenial spirit in the other. They reconnected when Gilson came to Harvard to attend the International Congress of Philosophy in Boston in 1926.  After the Congress, Gilson stayed at Harvard for three semesters. He taught a few classes and gave “four well-attended special lectures” creating his own stir on campus among students and faculty eager to hear what he had to say. There is no record of Porter having attended those lectures.  But it is reasonable to speculate that he was aware of Gilson and the views he was articulating.

Fairfield Porter said that it didn’t really matter what you painted. The objects depicted are not the “subject” of the painting. Rather, the act of painting was a way of connecting with reality. That was the point of the action and the painting was a record of that process.  This sounds very close to Gilson’s “immediate self-revelation of the act of being”. One important place to look for insight into Fairfield Porter’s art is metaphysics.