Fairfield Porter was born in Winnetka, Illinois on June 10, 1907. His parents were originally from New England, with his mother’s impressive family circle including the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Fairfield’s father had inherited a sizable fortune in Midwestern real estate and the Porters were decidedly well-off. Fairfield’s four other siblings included his elder brother, photographer Eliot Porter.
Despite his wealth, Porter was raised to be socially progressive, with his mother in particular strongly interested in social causes — a consciousness she had developed while studying at Bryn Mawr College. His mother also encouraged a wide education in literature and the arts, and in the summer the family enjoyed long visits to their home in Maine, a house which Fairfield’s architect father had designed himself. Despite these ideals and privileges, however, Porter’s upbringing was marked by feelings of distance and disapproval from his parents, with little emotional or physical closeness.
Education and Interiors
As a young man, Porter attended Harvard University and eventually began initial coursework at the Art Students League in New York. Among his teachers were the American Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton and artist Boardman Robinson. Porter worked better with Robinson, noting how unlike Benton, "[Robinson] taught you, he didn't teach a system. He taught the person he was talking to.…" Porter later developed a deeper appreciation for the style of the Impressionists, as well as Post-Impressionist painters Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. Porter found the latter two artists’ still-lifes and meaningfully quiet interiors fascinating and his future work would be markedly influenced by them.
Marriage and New York
In 1932, Porter married the poet Anne Channing and the couple would eventually have five children together, including an autistic son. They moved from Illinois to New York around World War II and soon became part of an artistic social circle that included painters Willem and Elaine de Kooning and poets Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler. While Porter was an early fan of Willem de Kooning, he did not let the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement overwhelm his work. Porter was never one to blindly follow creative or political schools of thought and insisted on remaining true to his own personal vision.
Porter’s landscapes at times recall the sparely detailed emptiness of American Realist Edward Hopper, while in other paintings like Long Island Landscape with Red Building or Island Farmhouse, the scenes seem warmer and more inviting. Porter’s interiors and portraits are fascinating studies in highly-charged quietness, with a sense of something having just happened — or something about to occur.
Paintings like July (1971), with its quartet of figures seated on Adirondack chairs, might even bring to mind the cryptic and intense fiction of American author John Cheever, while the curious 1966 scene The Mirror is a masterpiece of ambiguous reality. Conversely, the 1975 Breakfast Still Life watercolor is more expansive and playful and seems to be reaching back to Porter’s early fondness for the Post-Impressionists.
Complexity and Legacy
Fairfield Porter himself was not easily understood or classified. He was reportedly bisexual, with tendencies toward emotional detachment and mood swings that most likely stemmed from his childhood. His many-faceted mind allowed him to be a successful artist and an art critic, and he wrote for both The Nation and Art News in a nonconformist manner similar to that of his painting. In his art career, he was included in several Whitney Museum exhibits and was featured in the 1968 Venice Biennale.
Fairfield Porter died of a heart attack in September of 1975, while in Southampton, New York taking a stroll along the ocean shoreline. A large amount of his works were donated by his family to the Parrish Museum of Art in Southampton, which has proclaimed Porter to be "the most significant American realist from 1949 until his death in 1975." Fellow artist Rackstraw Downes collected and published a volume of Porter’s writings following Porter’s death, while many other Porter paintings can be seen at such institutions as The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The Spencer Museum of Art, The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — to name a few.
Sources
- Selections from the Fairfield Porter Archives -- Smithsonian Institution
- Fairfield Porter, A Life in Art -- Justin Spring (Yale University Press, 2000)
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