Fairfield Porter studied at Harvard University from 1924 till 1928.
On the photo - University's Widener Library
Gallery of Fairfield Porter
215 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019, United States
Fairfield Porter studied at the Art Students' League from 1928 till 1930
Gallery of Fairfield Porter
66 5th Ave, New York, NY 10011, United States
In 1945, Fairfield Porter took some lessons in a painting class of Jacques Maroger at Parsons School of Design
Gallery of Fairfield Porter
1300 York Ave, New York, NY 10065, United States
Fairfield Porter attended the anatomy classes at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences in 1932
Career
Gallery of Fairfield Porter
99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014, United States
Fairfield Porter exhibited annually at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1959 till 1968
Gallery of Fairfield Porter
3 S Mountain Ave, Montclair, NJ 07042, United States
A huge retrospective of Fairfield Porter's artworks was organized from 1974 to 1975 and was shown at barious museums, including the Montclair Art Museum
3 S Mountain Ave, Montclair, NJ 07042, United States
A huge retrospective of Fairfield Porter's artworks was organized from 1974 to 1975 and was shown at barious museums, including the Montclair Art Museum
Connections
Brother: Eliot Furness Porter
Eliot Furness Porter, the artist's brother
Spouse: Anne Elizabeth Channing
Anne Elizabeth Channing, Fairfield Porter's wife
mentor: Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead, one of Fairfield Porter's mentors
Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935-1975
(This new edition of Art in Its Own Terms restores a key s...)
This new edition of Art in Its Own Terms restores a key statement in the ongoing discussion between Modern art and its past, as Porter reviews such figures as de Kooning, Johns, Cornell, Rodin, Cézanne, Leonardo and many others.
Fairfield Porter was an American artist who worked in a representational style at the middle of the 20th century and when the Abstract Expressionism flourished.
His portraits, everyday scenes and landscapes of the places he lived in depicted relaxed and cosy areas showing its hidden extraordinary sides.
Porter was also known as an accomplished art critic.
Background
Ethnicity:
Fairfield Porter’s parents had roots in New England.
Fairfield Porter was born on June 10, 1907, in Winnetka, Illinois, United States. He was a fourth child of five in a family of James Foster and Ruth Wadsworth Furness.
Having a diploma of an architect, Porter’s father helped his wife in managing the family real estate business during difficult financial times.
Porter had one sister named Nancy Foster and three brothers whose names were Edward Clark, John Foster and Eliot Furness. The latter became a photographer.
Porter revealed his passion for art and literature very early. Due to his mother who was a poet, the boy developed a critical mind when watching pictures and artworks.
Education
Fairfield Porter received his general education at the New Trier High School which he finished in 1923.
A year later, he became a student of Harvard University in order to study philosophy. He attended the course of the English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead and the classes of Arthur Pope, a famous archaeologist and historian of ancient Persian art. It was this time when Porter began to take interest in art history.
Porter received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1928 and enrolled at the Art Students' League in New York City where he had been taught by Thomas Hart Benton for two years.
At the beginning of the new decade, the artist travelled to Europe in order to explore the Western art, including ancient Greek sculpture and Old Masters.
Four years later, he settled down in New York City where he attended the anatomy classes at Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences.
In 1945, Porter took some lessons in a painting class of Jacques Maroger at Parsons School of Design.
Besides, Fairfield Porter obtained an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Colby College Waterville, Maine in 1969 and a year later a doctorate of Humane Letters from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.
Fairfield Porter started his career at the beginning of the 1930s. In 1933, he joined the Socialist art group called Rebel Arts where he gave some lessons on drawing. Two years later, Porter obtained his first editor’s post in a socialist magazine ‘Arise!’.
The artist demonstrated his early paintings on the group shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and Artists’ Union of Chicago. The debut solo exhibition of Porter took place at North Shore Art Center in Winnetka, Illinois in 1939.
The first critical review Porter wrote dated to 1940. It was for the ‘Partisan Review’ magazine.
At the end of the decade, Fairfield Porter settled down in New York City. He gradually explored the city’s art world and met many abstract expressionist colleagues among who were a writer Edwin Denby, the artists Rudy Burckhardt, Willem and Elaine de Kooning.
Although Fairfield Porter was attracted by abstraction he tended to express the reality seen by his own eyes. Only by 1950s the artist elaborated his personal style and presented his artworks at the first one-man show in New York City in 1952 at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery which would represent his art thereafter. Since 1959, Porter had participated at six annual group exhibitions held at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1966, he began teaching art at the Southampton College and held the retrospective at the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Two year later, he was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale.
In addition to the popularity he gained in painting, Porter showed himself as a successful art critic this time. In 1951, he started his sixteen-year collaboration with ‘Art News’ magazine with a post of an associated editor obtained in 1952. The artist also contributed to ‘The Nation’ periodical and to Thomas Hess’s series on American painters producing the essay on an American landscapist Thomas Eakins.
Fairfield Porter continued his critical activity throughout the 1960s and early 1970s but the number of articles was not as high as earlier. At the same time, the most part of his well-known landscapes were created in the last five years of his life.
A huge retrospective of his artworks was organized from 1974 to 1975 and travelled to such art places as the Heckscher Museum on Long Island, the Queens Museum in Flushing, New York, and the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey.
During his career, Porter gave lectures at many educational art institutions, including Maryland Institute College of Art, Queens College, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Southampton College of Long Island University, and Yale University.
(A book about the 19th‐century American painter Thomas Eakins)
2011
painting
Red Cables
Wheat
Wild Roses
July Interior
Anemone and Daffodil
October Interior
Long Island Landscape with Red Building
Iced Coffee
Amherst Campus No. 1
Late Afternoon Snow
Jane and Elizabeth
The Mirror
July
Self-portrait
Girl in a Landscape
Penobscot Bay with Yellow Field
Still Life with Stapler
Under the Elms
Anne
Anne in a Striped Dress
The Christmas Tree
Apple Blossoms II
Portrait of John MacWhinnie
Field Flowers, Fruit and Dishes
Daffodils and Pear Tree
Still Life of Flowers on a Mirror
Apple Branch
Marina Scene
Politics
Fairfield Porter took interest in leftist politics at the end of the 1920s.
In 1927, the artist visited Moscow, Russia where he attended the lecture by Leon Trotsky which influenced his further political preferences.
Throughout his lifetime, Porter collaborated with such socialist organizations, as Arise magazine and Rebel Arts group. He produced artworks for the communist John Reed Club as well.
Views
Quotations:
"Any artist has a style which determines and is the particularity of his communication."
"The realist thinks he knows ahead of time what reality is, and the abstract artist what art is, but it is in its formality that realist art excels, and the best abstract art communicates an overwhelming sense of reality."
"The right use of colour can make any composition work."
"The profoundest order is revealed in what is most casual."
"Subject matter must be normal in the sense that it does not appear sought after so much as simply happening to one."
"It is the economic pressure on scholarship exerted by the universities that leads to the naming of movements in the arts, and once a movement is named, it is justified by words, and the literature around it gives it critical validity."
Membership
Rebel Arts
,
United States
1933
Chicago Society of Artists
,
United States
1938
International association of Art Critics
Personality
Fairfield Porter was a bisexual.
Quotes from others about the person
"To read Fairfield Porter is to rediscover art through the eyes of someone whose intuitive love and understanding of it have been matched by few contemporaries." John Ashbery, American poet
"Perhaps the major American artist of the century." John Ashbery, American poet
"Blunt, intuitive, scholarly, inspired – I believe no other critic has so tackled the meaning of twentieth-century art, has tightened our vision of it." Barbara Guest, American poet
"He remains one of the most accomplished representational painters we have, a master of the art of landscape and still life." Hilton Kramer, art critic of The Times
Interests
Artists
Édouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, Diego Velázquez
Connections
Fairfield Porter married a poet Anne Elizabeth Channing on September 22, 1932. The family produced five children named John Fairfield, Laurence Minot, Richard, Katharine Minot and Elizabeth.
Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction
A book dedicated to the exhibition of Fairfield Porter held at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, at the Cleveland Museum of Art and at the Whitney Museum of American Art at different times in 1983
1983
Fairfield Porter
The book celebrates the life and career of the twentieth-century realist who expressed radical views in his 1930's cityscapes as well as creating airy landscapes of Southhampton and Maine
1992
Fairfield Porter: a Life in Art
This absorbing biography of Fairfield Porter by Justin Spring tells of Porter`s troubled, bohemian life, his struggle to raise a family while dealing with a bisexual identity, his work as an artist producing realist works in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement, and his late triumph as a painter and critic
1999
Material Witness: the Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter
This collection of Fairfield Porter's letters introduced by a poet and critic David Lehman with notes by Justin Spring demonstrates Porter's profound contribution to American art and literature and displays his acumen as a political critic
Fairfield Porter
The first comprehensive survey of the beloved figurative realist painter Fairfield Porter consisting the essays by John Wilmerding, Karen Wilkin and J. D. McClatchy