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| Fairfield Porter, "Velazquez Study", 1974 |
Fairfield Porter is a singularly unique American artist whose work connects the art of 19th century painters known as the Nabis with post-World War II figurative American painting. Born into a wealthy Midwestern family and educated at Harvard, Porter was at times a host to many younger American painters, an art critic, a poet and a troubled artist-hermit. He struggled through the 1930s to find his way with paint but came into his own in the 1950s. His figurative work was ascending just as the critical attention was quickly turning away from it. Inspired to take up figurative work by comments made by the Abstract Expressionists proponent and critic Clement Greenberg, Porter placed himself squarely within the New York School of art.
Porter came about when the figure and representational painting were being directly challenged as a viable artistic activity. His subjects were thought of as having the look and feel of a comfortable New England bourgeois lifestyle. But Porter didn’t see it that way. Rather, he chose the subjects because they were easy, that is, the views of Maine he painted were those that he saw just out his door. In this way he was a pragmatist not an old guard reactionary.
Porter suggested that he was interested in the process of painting and not the subject. Process is a broad term that encompasses the manner an artist paints as well as his interest in his own activity. For Porter, painting was "the connection between yourself and everything ... you connect yourself to everything which includes yourself”. I have sympathy with this sentiment and I would refer to this as a painting practice whose goal is the further realization of one’s subjective state in paint.
Looking at Porter’s work, I can see the delight in abstract patterning that he must have picked up on in the paintings of the Nabis as well as the abstract painters in his social circle. His painting seems simple and easy but I am doubtful that this was the case. Often graphic clarity and well-positioned tones do not easily come into existence and Porter’s years of struggle bear this out.
Currently, what is of interest to me about Porter is that he highlights a particular type of artist cut off from a European artistic tradition of observation. That is, I believe, many artists of the 20th Century were culturally cut off from investigating the visual field as a subject. After Cezanne and the School of Paris, artists began to see painting as a series of artistic choices. One no longer practiced painting with an open receptive attitude asking questions like “is this brush mark on the canvas the exact shape that I see?”. Rather the artist began to impose his own views about the world on the canvas stating “this is the shape I want it to be”. Unfortunately, this modern belief establishes a fundamental separation between the artist and the principles of the natural world leaving one to push paint around guided by artistic principles alone.
I have come to see Porter as endeavoring to understand the abstract underpinnings that belie a very specific and detailed painting practice that has the honest observation of nature at its core. Interestingly, Porter long believed that Velazquez was the greatest of all painters of the past. He said, "[Velázquez] leaves things alone . . . . It isn't that he copies nature, but he doesn't impose himself upon it. He is open to it rather than wanting to twist it . . . and he also knows when it's unimportant to pay attention." In terms of openness to the visual field and sensitivity to human form I would agree.
Quotes in this post come from a wonderful article by Klaus Ottman called "An Unfinished Quality": Fairfield Porter's Creative Process”. The essay was authored to coincide with an exhibition of Fairfield Porter at the Parrish Art Museum April 11- June 13, 2010.
You may view Klauss Ottman’s article here: http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/9aa/9aa336.htm
You may view an archive of Porter’s work at the Parrish Museum here: http://www.parrishart.org/parrish.asp?id=130