Fairfield Porter (1907–1975) has become a painter’s painter, and it is easy to see why. As a representational artist in an age of abstraction, Porter went up against Clement Greenberg and famously attacked his bullying idealism: “[Greenberg] said, ‘You can’t paint figuratively today.’ … I thought, ‘If that’s what he says, I think I will do just exactly what he says I can’t do! That’s all I will do.’ I might have become an abstract painter except for that.”

In the 1960s, as art turned minimal and “literal,” Porter also showed how painting could still be relevant without appealing to the mazes of Frank Stella. “I like in art when the artist doesn’t know what he knows in general; he only knows what he knows specifically,” Porter explained in 1968 to Paul Cummings of the Archive of American Art. At Harvard, as a privileged undergraduate in the 1920s, Porter studied the philosophy of David Hume with Alfred North Whitehead. “Hume’s idea [is] that all you know is one sensation after another; you do not know the connections between them.” A writer and critic as well as a painter, Porter thought deeply about the role of empiricism in paint. For him these concerns included the details of place and the specifics of construction.

A generation of figurative painters, several now represented by Betty Cuningham’s Chelsea gallery, have emerged under Porter’s influence—Rackstraw Downes and Philip Pearlstein to name but two. Considering the achievements of his disciples, and the extent to which he is adulated by painters today, is there any reason not to like Fairfield Porter?

In one note of dissent, Larry Rivers once called Porter’s paintings “flat-footed.” To me, in the present show, they appear to shuffle through the Amherst quadrangle with a copy of William Shawn’s New Yorker grumpily rolled under one elbow-patched arm. The colors are dreary, the compositions dishevelled, the scenery marred by the brutalist architecture of The Campus (1970), or the parking lot and burned-out grass cutting through the blaze of foliage in Amherst Campus No. 1 (1969).

Porter often set himself up against the great nineteenth-century realist Thomas Eakins, another educated son of privilege. He disdained Eakins for having “to convince his conscience that painting was work.” But Eakins could find beauty in American industry—in medicine and sport and, yes, in painting—those labors of the body. Porter sought value in the works of the mind—in John Ashbery and James Schuyler, whom he depicted on a sofa in 1967 composing the play Nest of Ninnies. Or there in Anne in a Striped Dress, with a Life magazine cover featuring Adlai Stevenson, brainy hero, tacked behind her.

Porter visited the Soviet Union in 1927 and after Harvard spent much of the 1930s advancing the cause of Socialism. Porter’s paintings display the faded dreams of lost idealism. He is an empiricist, but one with downcast eyes.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 24 Number 8, on page 44
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