Depicting the look of the world in paint is difficult. Many skills are required to create a convincing illusion of three dimensions on a two dimensional surface and this is just the beginning. How does one suggest specific qualities of light and render significant details, all while dealing with the capricious nature of one’s medium?  And then there is the infinite mystery of color.  Add to that a “subject” that is transient and the whole process becomes so difficult that an artist, being largely satisfied with a particular result, would be tempted to try to replicate that success. But Fairfield Porter never succumbed to that temptation. Each painting was a new experience.

Fairfield Porter worked in a wide variety of ways.  Certainly he often painted with his subject before him, but not always.  Sometimes paintings would originate from drawings. Direct and indirect methods were frequently combined in a single painting.  Often he would “find” his subjects, e.g. the dishes left on the table after breakfast. On other occasions, he would create a painting with an art historical reference in mind.   Although he was pleased that he learned to increase his painting speed over time, he did not always paint quickly once that approach had been mastered.  He painted small paintings and large paintings.  He would sometimes paint more than one version of a painting.  Without a fixed system, Porter remained open and alert when responding to each situation.   Rackstraw Downes, painter and editor of Art In Its Own Terms, described “…the subject of his mature painting: to keep as far away as possible from any organizing principle or procedure that could put limits to his feeling for uniqueness.”

Categorizing Porter as simply a “realist” has distorted analyses of his art and his place in the history of American painting. One typical definition of realism in art and literature describes it as simply an “effort at faithful reproduction of nature”.  The general public and many art historians are inclined to agree with that definition. They assume that the goal of the realist is to document facts.  Porter, on the other hand, was adamantly opposed to that approach to painting.  He consistently criticized American artists who felt compelled to put everything in, attributing that tendency to a puritanical, over zealous conscience.  In his criticism Porter recognized in others the struggles he had encountered in his own work.  On one occasion he writes that there appears to be “…some conflict between (the artist’s) conscience about facts and the painting he was making.”  About another artist he wrote: “The paintings are full of beautiful passages; and he seems to be struggling against the inhibition of facts.”   But the battle against facts is sometimes lost.  In a 1958 Andrew Wyeth  exhibition Porter felt that puritanical tendencies had won out.  He wrote that Wyeth’s “…detailed realism reduces objects to non-objects. His painting expresses conscience rather than sensibility”.   

The most obvious example of Porter’s willingness to edit reality are the mullions in his studio window that almost never appear in his paintings.

In his portrait of Anne, the studio window becomes, literally and figuratively, a “picture window”.

Space is altered as well. The neighbor’s house seen through the window seems to be on a ground plane that is continuous with the floor upon which Anne is standing. But Porter’s studio was on the second floor of a converted barn.

Fairfield Porter believed that American artists were inhibited by the country’s Puritanical culture. He saw this reflected in their “conscientiousness” about putting in all the details of the subject before them. He also saw Puritanism in their reluctance to embrace the sensuous nature of paint, thus inhibiting their ability to maximize its expressive potential. He admired the Abstract Expressionists, De Kooning in particular, because they had broken through that reticence. One of the first of his reviews published in ARTnews summarizes Porter’s point of view.

What he (Wallace) does is rare among American painters, indeed rare today. His pictures look as though made of paint, and the beauty of the landscape and the beauty of the paint are the same: he loves the paint and he loves the landscape, they are both material. It appears as if he tries a painting many times, until it paints itself, and the exploitation of the medium is not a difficulty to be overcome, but the essential creative process.

Fairfield Porter  ARTnews  October 1951

Color is another inherently sensual aspect of painting with which Americans struggled. The potential of color to evoke an intense emotional response was perhaps frightening in a culture inclined to suppress emotion.  But it was also simply difficult to master, especially in the face of minimal options for structured training.  Porter very purposefully set out to master color and exploit its fullest potential. At this he succeeded. The aspect of Porter’s art that is most consistently and accurately recognized is his skill as a colorist.

The “burning visionary yellow” of the clapboard shadows in Island Farmhouse is a brilliant invention. The magic here is that a totally unexpected choice feels authentic. How did he do it?

Porter’s skill with color was inextricably linked to his mastery of value. Many years before he painted Island Farmhouse, he wrote a short review that suggests his awareness of the difficulty as well as the solution to creating such a painting.  In May 1956 he wrote that

…(Laskoy) has something Americans seldom have: a sense of the values of colors, so that the brightest colors keep in place…”.

Analyzing an artist’s skill in controlling value is a recurring theme in Porter’s criticism.  In an October 1951 review of a Milton Avery exhibition he wrote:

The values sometimes lack that extra precision that is one of the signs of masterly painting.

Porter’s own mastery of value can be seen in the remarkable subtlety and precision of the pinks, greys and mysterious neutrals that appear in so many of his paintings.

In his criticism, Porter regularly commented on the way that artists handled black.

He often challenged himself to use black in his own paintings, in small notes as well as large masses.

Porter was not an outlier in his focus on the difficulty of handling black. In Matisse The Man and His Art, 1869-1918, Jack Flam describes an encounter between Renoir and Matisse. During the first season Matisse spent in Nice, a friend took him to meet Renoir. Matisse brought a few small paintings to show the old master including The Open Window (1917).

(Renoir) was astonished by the way the darkest tone of that picture, a black curtain pole above the window, held its place in space—against all logic, supposed good practice, and common sense. (Renoir himself had banished black from his palette decades earlier.) He asked Matisse to hold the picture some distance away and exclaimed, “But how did you do that? If I put black like that in a picture, it would jump forward, it wouldn’t stay in place.”

This is the painting Matisse showed Renoir

It is likely that Renoir would also have been impressed by Fairfield Porter’s ability to get the black phone to stay on the wall in his Girl and Geranium.

Painting “from life” is a direct process during which artists work from a subject that is present before them e.g. a landscape, still life or a person sitting for a portrait. “Indirect” painting relies on direct observation initially. But an artist then takes that gathered information to use in the process of creating a final image. Mural painting requires indirect painting. The wall is in a fixed location. The image to be painted on that wall must be designed based on drawings and color studies created by direct observation of elements of the eventual final image. Mural painting was popular at Harvard during the time Porter was a student there. In 1932 Porter wrote to Stieglitz with news of his “first successful mural commission”, a mural he had painted for his in-laws in Sherborn, Massachusetts. Porter’s comfort with “indirect” painting methods served him well throughout his career. Drawing was an essential element of his practice.

This undated city scape is probably from the 1940s

This drawing is a source for the painted sketch at left.

Printmaking also requires indirect methods.

Here is one example of a drawing that could serve as a source for a painting or print.

Porter rarely painted from photographs. But he never ruled out anything that might help him produce a good painting.

This snapshot taken by his daughter inspired A Short Walk.

Late in his career, Fairfield Porter began taking on short term teaching positions. When a student exclaimed at his ability to solve a painting problem “in five minutes!", he responded: “Five minutes and forty years.”

Throughout his life he had continually struggled to improve and expand his painting skills which, in turn, expanded his freedom. If someone said “it can’t be done”, he was willing to give it a try.

These are beautiful paintings created near the end of his life. How on earth does one go about painting a wave?