| Despite his ambiguity toward family life, Fairfield Porter (1907–75)
painted his five children, wife, and friends in places he loved, with
intimate, yet sometimes isolating grace. The paintings in this exhibition
document the familial ambiance and specificity of time, people, and place,
in a painting style compared to artists as diverse as Édouard Vuillard
and Willem de Kooning, Porter's favorite artist. (1) With their abstracted
and simplified figures and objects, Porter's paintings combined American
painting ambitions and directions in the mid-20th century. Abstract expressionist
painters such as de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and others eclipsed Porter
in the gallery scene, as mainstream American painting turned more to abstraction
and those margins moved to the center. Yet Porter's oeuvre and his devotion
to abstracted yet recognizable figural and landscape painting are reflected
in a parallel and historically significant group of American painters
that includes Alex Katz, Jane Freilicher, and Larry Rivers.
Porter has been named an "intimist" for his admiration for the
work of French postimpressionists Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, whose paintings
of the private and personal domestic arena reflected the French middle
class and their interest in pushing the impressionist painters' abstraction
even further. Porter saw the work in 1938 at the Art Institute of Chicago,
noting, "What I like in Vuillard is that what he's doing seems to
be ordinary, but the extraordinary is everywhere." (2) Porter's paintings
in this exhibition share the domestic intimacy, though not the middle-class
legacy of Bonnard and Vuillard's paintings. Porter was reared in a wealthy
family and while as an adult he had some money shortages, he did not have
to work for a living. He was an accomplished writer and his commissioned
artist's monographs and art reviews for The Nation and ARTnews
brought in a little money over the years when his paintings didn't sell.
But he and his family lived in Southampton, Long Island, and summered
on Great Spruce Head Island, his family's Maine island. While Porter's
admiration for Vuillard and his personal background are established art
historical territory, it may be useful to remember that he shared the
postimpressionists' visual ideologies for subject matter, light treatment,
and the abstract expressionists' painterly manipulation of form and surface.
July illustrates Porter's deep appreciation for land and place,
as does the painting Wheat. Wheat suggests how a painting
that at first glance seems to comprise only a few muted colors can seem
simultaneously light-filled yet disquieting. The unpeopled slice of house,
trees, and outbuildings mediates the anticipatory tension between the
sky's slate blue density and the wheat field's placidity. In July
the figures, while abstract, are intricately related to the landscape
in which they are seated. The brilliant white of the lawn chairs anchors
them to the ground, and the giant trees anchor the painting to place,
just as Porter himself was inextricably anchored to friends, family, and
place through obligation and desire. Great Spruce Head Island (which his
father bought in 1912), where this is painted, and Southampton, Long Island,
his other home, were places for which Porter felt deep attachment.
Like many of Porter's figures, the four in July are isolated
from the painter and from the viewer. Rather than interacting, they seem
disconnected from one another. Large swaths of paint separate them, and
their gestures do not link them. The back of the foreground chair forms
a visual barrier to the scene of what initially seems intimate. Porter's
preparatory drawing Study for July is much more lively, making
the painting seem slightly sober only by comparison. In the study Porter
arranged the chairs and figures in an interactive gesture which he abandoned
in the painting. Porter's disengagement is surely deliberate, as he concentrated
on the act of painting rather than on the emotional appeal family and
friends might engender. He noted that "neurotic or psychological
values [were] irrelevant." (3) Porter further revealed his disinterest
in emotive or expressive qualities in a discussion of Alex Katz's work:
What I admire in Alex Katz's paintings is that they remind me of a first
experience in nature, the first experience of seeing. And that interests
me more than-expressionism doesn't interest me very much, expressionism
is a problem. But visualness interests me very much. And it must be that
"first timeness"-the world starts in the picture. That's what
I'm interested in. (4)
Girl Reading Outdoors suggests a similar equanimity to that which
we see in July and other paintings. While the girl's presence
in the yard is easily understood - the chair and books feel natural in
the environment - her reserve suggests itself in her tight posture. She
huddles over, head down, seemingly absorbed in her task. One of her feet
is turned inward in a protective stance, suggesting her casual indifference
to Porter and the viewer. She engages neither the painter nor her beautifully
rendered surroundings, yet she is perfectly integrated into the landscape.
In Girl in a Landscape, the girl holds her hands behind her back
and her body successfully links the foreground to the vast middle ground's
stretch of light-saturated blue water. As in Porter's other paintings,
the girl and the landscape are painted with patches of light and color
which fuse into a coherent image. In Portrait of a Girl, the
girl's hands are folded stiffly in her lap, as are daughter Elizabeth's
in The Mirror. Conversely, Girl and Geranium is a more
emotionally accessible painting, suggesting a young girl's awkwardness
through her stiff arms and quirky stance. Here Porter has implied, through
her gesture and her engaging look (she is one of the only figures who
connects to the viewer through her focused gaze), her girlish vulnerability
within this familiar domestic setting. In what looks like a cozy and light-filled
breakfast nook, someone's purse casually rests on the table as if its
owner recently dashed through. Porter has captured the essence of this
specific place.
Although slight and always subtle,
corporeal gesture is suggestive in Porter's figure paintings. Despite
their intimate subject matter - family, daughters, wife, friends - Porter's
paintings often suggest the dissociation that exists within families.
Daughters Katie and Elizabeth rarely ever smile (never in these works)
and seem like discrete, unattached beings, as if Porter granted them the
independence children crave, albeit an independence that may be inappropriate
for their tender ages. Isolation seems particularly acute in the visually
complex painting The Mirror. Daughter Elizabeth stares dispassionately
into the distance, detached from either the viewer - her gaze is past
us - or her father who is reflected in the mirror. He holds a paintbrush
but his canvas is out of the double portrait's range. Porter's reliance
on Velázquez's seminal painting Las Meninas (1656) is
acknowledged by both historians and Porter himself.
By repeating objects, people, and landscape, Porter knit strands of familiarity
into his body of work. While we recognize family and friends in the paintings,
Porter usually did not name them in the titles, deliberately creating
the emotional aloofness we may feel. By refusing to name, Porter maintained
some form of critical distance, guiding us to the painterly surface. Yet
friends and simple objects become iconic when viewed from the distance
of time. For instance, Porter's studio couch in The Mirror also
surfaces in Portrait of Elaine de Kooning (1957), Portrait
of Frank O'Hara (1957), and other paintings, provoking a variety
of possible responses.(5) Perhaps the couch was tied to the studio through
the sheer inertia of replacing it, through frugality, and through its
interesting visual and physical presence in the paintings. Porter's lushly
articulated familial and familiar subjects superbly punctuate the stylistic,
iconographic, and even, in spite of himself, emotional arc of Porter's
paintings.
Dana Self
Curator
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