Fairfield Porter

Abstract

Abstract Fai,field Porter’s was one of the most unusual careers in the American art of his time, for it was a career haunted by a sense of belatedness. The advantages he enjoyed in his early life-an elite education in the best schools, European travel, a family that supported his vocation, and a wide acquaintanceship with men of talent and accomplishment in many fields-had the paradoxical effect of postponing the development of his own artistic gifts. When he first emerged as a painter whose work commanded attention and criticism in the 19Sos, he was a generation older than most of the painters he exhibited with at the TI’bor de Nagy Gallery in New York and the poets who then formed the principle circle of his admirers. Beyond that circle, he still found himself an odd man out on the art scene as a painter who was too traditional for the modernists and too modern for the traditionalists. It would be another twenty years before he began to receive the critical and public acclaim that were his due. Even as late as the 1970s, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art characterized his work as “too tame” to be of interest to the museum. It wasn’t until 1984, nearly a decade after hz’s death, that he began to attain the status of an American classic with a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, “Fai, field Porter (1907-1975): Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction.” By that time, I had been writing about and praising Porter’s paintings for nearly a quarter of a century, mainly in the New York Times.