When Fairfield Porter was hired to write for ARTnews, the magazine’s editor-in-chief speculated that he would not last more than six months because he was “too intense”.  But Porter stayed for eight years. His assignments were diverse.  He contributed to the magazine’s ongoing series that focused on artists at work in their studios; among his subjects were Philip Evergood, Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher. He wrote profiles of artists both living and dead,  e.g. John Marin and Winslow Homer.  He wrote articles that discussed a particular theme or major exhibition such as the 1957 George Bellows retrospective at the National Gallery in Washington D.C.. There was also an occasional book review.  But the primary assignment for Porter and the magazine’s many other contributors was reviewing current art exhibitions.  According to one writer, ARTnews editor Thomas Hess “… made it a rule to cover all shows current in New York as a matter of historical record.  In case of dislike, a mere mention would do, but there had to be at least one line.”  Fulfilling this goal became more challenging over the course of the 1950s because of the dramatic increase in the number of art galleries in Manhattan.  Porter’s intensity and energy served him well.  By the time he resigned in 1959,  ARTnews had published almost 900 of his short reviews.

In the hotbed of artistic activity that was New York in the 1950s, artists, dealers, curators and collectors would turn immediately to “Reviews & Previews” after picking up the magazine.  The significance of Porter’s criticism was quickly recognized.  Among the many contributors employed by ARTnews, his was a distinctive voice.  His undogmatic attitude was a welcome relief for many observers of an increasingly contentious art world. In 1954 the College Art Association gave Porter an award specifically for his short reviews, commending him “for remarkable ability to give a complete and critical report without irrelevant aestheticizing in a very brief compass”.  Fairfield Porter was 44 years old when he began writing for ARTnews.  His aesthetic point of view was fully formed reflecting an education in art that was more complete than that of any  American painter or critic of his generation.

Fairfield Porter grew up in an affluent, erudite household in a North Shore suburb of Chicago. The family of his father, James, had come to the Midwest from New Hampshire.  An early investment in land that ultimately became Chicago’s “Loop” was the source of the Porter family’s wealth. James married Fairfield’s mother Ruth Wadsworth Furness in June 1898. She, like James, grew up in Chicago in a prosperous family with close ties to relatives in the East. Her mother was a Wadsworth, related to the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Ruth’s father William Eliot Furness (Harvard 1860; Harvard Law 1863) was from Philadelphia. After the Civil War he moved to Chicago to practice law.  By that time, his uncle William Greenleaf Eliot (1811-1887) was well established in the West. Eliot, a Unitarian minister, had moved to St. Louis after graduating from Harvard Divinity School.  He founded Washington University in 1853.  Ruth stayed in touch with Eliot’s two grandsons Henry and Thomas.  The Porter family watched with great interest as their cousin “Tom” evolved into the renowned poet T. S. Eliot.  In his biography, Fairfield Porter, An American Classic, John Spike writes that the Porter family had “…an almost religious faith in literacy and letters.”   Fairfield Porter’s work as a critic reflected this familial inheritance.

James Porter earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard.  After their marriage and a honeymoon in Europe, he and Ruth moved to New York where he obtained a graduate degree in architecture from Columbia University.   When the young couple returned to Chicago in 1899, James intended to pursue a career as an architect.  Though he ultimately spent his professional life managing the family’s real estate holdings, he maintained his love of architecture intellectually and in practice.   At the turn of the 20th century James built a house for his family north of the city on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.  Fairfield Porter described it as “one of the most beautiful Greek Revival houses in the United States.”

Ruth Porter earned her undergraduate degree at Bryn Mawr. There she developed a particular affinity for Greek culture, a love that was passed on to her children. The Porters lived  with cast plaster replicas of the Parthenon friezes both in Illinois and in the family’s summer house in Maine.  These were but one of many examples of reproductions of European masterpieces that filled the Porter family homes. Reflecting back on his childhood Fairfield Porter said: “I think the chief influences on me as a child were my father’s interest in art and architecture. We had photographs all over the house of great Italian paintings and of architecture.” 

Porter’s knowledge of art history was dramatically enhanced when he was able to see this great art in person. He was fourteen when he first visited Europe with his family.  In July and August of 1924 another family tour took him to Scandinavia, Scotland and England where he saw Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks at London’s National Gallery, a painting that  “…was familiar to me from photographs.” His own new “discoveries”  were Titian, Veronese and Turner. The summer before his senior year in college, he took a walking tour of France with his brother Edward. In 1931/1932 he returned yet again to Europe for an extended stay. The Porters’ admiration for the fine arts tradition of Western Europe was an interest they shared with other wealthy families in Chicago. Though the Porters now lived in the suburbs,  they remained firmly within the milieu of Chicago’s elite families by virtue of their genealogy, educational background and financial status,

In his application to Harvard, Fairfield Porter stated that his intended profession was “architect”.  When he arrived on campus in the fall of 1924, he was assigned an advisor in the Fine Arts department, a program that focused on the history of Western European art and architecture.  Given his already considerable knowledge in this area, Porter was well prepared to take advantage of the courses it offered.  He was particularly impressed by one required freshman class,  Arthur Pope’s Drawing and Painting and Principles of Design.   More than forty years later, Porter recalled: I learned a tremendous amount from him.

Pope’s lectures were supplemented by basic studio exercises. One student recalled: “…we learned about glazes, oil and tempera, as well as watercolor.”  Alfred Barr, Jr., future director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, was a graduate student when he took Pope’s class. At the time, both Barr and Porter expressed skepticism about the value of these exercises.  They did not yet fully understand the motivation for Harvard’s new approach to studying art history.  In Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art, Sybil Gordon Cantor writes that:

The basis of the training at Harvard was the analysis of styles explored through materials and techniques with the aim of discovering universal formal principles.

This pedagogical approach was underpinned by the aesthetic theories of Bernard Berenson.

In the first decades of the 20th century, Bernard Berenson was “…one of the most famous art historians in the Western world.”  He had earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1887, then left for Europe where he established his career as an art connoisseur.   The focus of his scholarship was Italian Renaissance art.  The Villa i Tatti outside of Florence became his lifelong home. Early in his career Berenson established a new method for studying art, one that emphasized close observation of an object’s physical characteristics.  This took precedence over iconography and historical context. His approach contradicted the dominant late 19th century mode of “literary” and “moralistic” art criticism which espoused the belief that art was obliged to uplift society. Prioritizing visual experience, Berenson stressed “the value of the work of art as contained entirely within itself.”  His point of view later became a justification for the validity of paintings that had no obvious subject apart from the paint itself. Berenson objected to this appropriation of his ideas; he never approved of modern art. But he could not put the genie back in the bottle.

A new approach to studying art required a new approach to writing art criticism.  Berenson developed his own vocabulary of “tactile values” and “ideated sensations” and an innovative style of writing. Here is one scholar’s description of Berenson’s early essays on Italian painting:  “Addressed to a general audience, they were brief, elliptical, aphoristic, informal, conversational yet assertive, occasionally arbitrary and personal—a curious mixture of dogma and offhandedness…”.  Eliminate “dogma” and this could be a description of Fairfield Porter’s art criticism. Porter acknowledged that Berenson’s writing style had been a model for his work as a critic. He also acknowledged a second important influence on his criticism, the work of Paul Rosenfeld.

Paul Rosenfeld’s intellectual interests were wide ranging as were his skills. He had earned degrees from Yale (1912) and the Columbia School of Journalism (1913) before working briefly as a reporter. After spending a few months traveling in Europe, he returned to New York in the fall of 1914 ready to begin his literary career.  He quickly made a name for himself writing about art, literature and especially music. He wrote essays and books. He also became an influential editor.  As he rose to prominence, Rosenfeld developed  a friendship with Alfred Stieglitz, the renowned photographer and impresario of modernism in American fine arts. Fairfield Porter was lucky enough to be introduced to Rosenfeld, as well as Stieglitz and the artists in his circle because of a chance encounter in the boarding house where Porter lived in New York,

After graduating from Harvard in 1928 Fairfield Porter moved to New York City with the intention of becoming a professional painter. His education had provided him with an excellent background in art history but no actual coursework in painting. In order to expand his technical skills and be in touch with teachers who were practicing artists, he enrolled at the Art Students League on 57th St.  But he chose to live downtown. In his 1968 interview with Paul Cummings, Porter recalled the importance of that decision.

…what was very influential was that I lived in New York on 15th Street. I had a room, when I first came to New York, in a rooming house. Once I left my room to go to the bathroom in the middle of the floor; and when I came back, a man came down from upstairs and introduced himself. He had seen a painting of mine in my room by Harold Weston. He knew Harold Weston and he invited me up to his apartment. He and his wife had a collection of Marin, O'Keefe, Dove, and so on and so on. They were friends of Stieglitz. So I met Marin there at their house, and I also met Paul Rosenfeld at their house, who influenced me very much.

Paul Cummings: In what way, would you say?

Fairfield Porter: Well, as a critic…his gift for language, his gift for being able to describe what something was like, to put it into words...When I wrote criticism, I was thinking of his criticism, not just of Berenson…I remember things that he would say. I remember telling him I didn't like Odilon Redon. And he said: What's the matter? Is he too ultra violet? And I thought that's exactly it! He had this impressionistic way of talking, which was extremely accurate, beautiful.

The relationships Fairfield Porter developed with Paul Rosenfeld and Alfred Stieglitz and the artists of his circle had an enormous impact on his career as a painter and a critic.  The impact also extended in a very significant way to his brother Eliot. Fairfield introduced Eliot to Stieglitz, ultimately leading to an exhibition at Stieglitz’ gallery that inaugurated Eliot’s illustrious career as a photographer.

Fairfield Porter’s first published criticism was “Murals for Workers”, a survey of the murals currently to be seen in New York City.  It appeared in 1935 in Arise,  a short lived magazine produced by the socialist Rebel Arts Center.  More than fifteen years would pass before his criticism would again be published, but his interest in writing did not falter. Upon meeting Willem De Kooning at the end of the 1930s,  Porter immediately recognized the significance of his work and felt compelled to write about it.  His piece on De Kooning was rejected by Partisan Review and then by The Kenyon Review .  The magazines were reluctant to publish an article about an “unknown” painter. It was a lasting regret for Porter that he did not get credit for being the first to write about De Kooning.

When Porter became an editorial associate at ARTnews, his interest in writing about De Kooning continued to be thwarted. The magazine’s editor Thomas Hess had “claimed” De Kooning for himself when handing out assignments. So it is no surprise that Porter chose De Kooning as the subject of the first review he wrote for The Nation in 1959. Finally, he had an opportunity to see publication of his thoughts on this transformational painter. Porter’s article won a cash prize from the Longview Foundation. De Kooning was also pleased, saying that Porter understood “his intention.”

After WWII when Elaine De Kooning recommended Fairfield Porter for an editorial associate position at ARTnews,  he recalled: “I jumped at the chance because I had always thought that I would be good at this, better than anybody…”.  He had spent his adult life developing the eye of a connoisseur and the studio skills of a practicing artist. He was ready to bring all of that knowledge to bear in his art criticism.

As a critic, Porter was first and foremost an attentive observer.  He said that an ARTnews editor had suggested to him:  “…what you should do is just report… the best criticism is simply the best description.  And I think that is true.”   Focusing intently on the physical properties of the work before him was a method he had absorbed during his undergraduate years at Harvard.  He approached every exhibition with this in mind, harboring no preconceived ideological framework. Porter gave the same careful consideration to each artist he reviewed, regardless of status or style.

In addition to closely observing the art he was reviewing, Porter often places the work within an historical context reflecting his expansive knowledge of art history. His comments on French and American painting are particularly revealing.  In France, “…professionalism is to be expected” and standards for craftsmanship are high.  In the United States, a country without a long fine arts tradition, the artist had no status and little training resulting in art that Porter describes as “provincial and imitative.”  He is very specific about the deficiencies he sees. He is particularly critical of Americans’ poor understanding of color and their unimaginative dependence on literal transcriptions of reality. Porter saw their tendency to accumulate details as a reflection of “conscience” rather than an aesthetic purpose.  He believed that American artists, inhibited by the country’s Puritanical culture, were reluctant to embrace the sensuous nature of the painting medium and maximize its expressive potential.  The dramatic innovations of the new abstract painters, De Kooning in particular, had broken through that reticence thus garnering his heartfelt admiration.

When Fairfield Porter resigned from ARTnews in 1959, he hoped to get away from the constant demands of deadlines. ButThe Nation offered him a position as a regular contributor with the understanding that he would be free to choose his own assignments.  This sounded appealing and he accepted the job.  However, he quickly realized that the freedom was a burden.  Which shows and artists should he review?  To make that decision he had to spend much more time seeing many exhibitions. The possibilities seemed endless.  Assignments had been finite. After two years, Porter resigned.  He was well known in New York’s art world and his paintings were selling. He decided to shift his primary focus to painting, but he continued to write.

Until the end of his life Fairfield Porter was writing and rewriting theoretical essays, examples of which are Art and Knowledge, published in the February 1966 issue of ARTnews and Technology and Artistic Perception a lecture he gave at Yale. Both can be found in Art In Its Own Terms Selected Criticism 1935-1975. This collection of Porter’s criticism, first published in 1979, was edited by the painter Rackstraw Downes who also wrote the Introduction. Downes offers reliable insight into Porter’s distinctive reading of art history and his equally distinctive approach to painting. He had been a graduate student at Yale when he first met Porter in the early 1960s. They developed a friendship that lasted until Porter’s death in 1975.

Extraordinary though it is, Art In Its Own Terms just scratches the surface of Porter’s work as a critic. His writing should be collected in two volumes, one that would include his long criticism, longer articles for ARTnews, and his lectures; a second should focus solely on his short reviews. Agree with him or not, it is impossible to read Porter’s work and not recognize a great mind manifesting the intellectual rigor that most American art historians have assumed he lacked. Ideally, this would lead them to set aside their preconceptions about American figurative painting and reexamine his art.