Smithsonian<\/span><\/a>, applies equally to himself.<\/p>\nThey \u201cleave things alone:\u201d<\/p>\n
I think Velazquez (is) better than any other painter now. But I saw (Velazquez) again. I was beginning to be interested in what you can do with paint, what is the quality of paint, what is its nature. And this liquid surface of Velazquez, I admired and also what might be called understatement. Although I don’t like that word really. The impersonality… I don’t know what word to use. He leaves things alone, you know. It isn’t that he copies nature, but he doesn’t impose himself upon it. He is open to it rather than wanting to twist it. Let the paint dictate to you or let yourself be dictated to. I think there’s more there than there is in willful manipulation.<\/p>\n
Porter was all about the paint and much of his struggle to find himself as a painter was a search for how to make the paint feel a certain way when it came off the brush and sat on the canvas. He loved de Kooning and was the first to recognize de Kooning\u2019s originality. At first glance the two painters hardly seem to have anything in common. Yet Porter wanted what de Kooning showed: the understanding that putting down a certain quality of paint itself could be the whole purpose of making a painting. He recognized how AbEx was tapping into an instinctive, subconscious energy, adopted from surrealism, but it simplified this life force into mark-making rather than depiction. The paint was the point. The paint embodied gesture in the mark, and gesture for the abstract expressionists (and for Porter) was almost the equivalent of literary surrealism\u2019s practice of automatic writing. Gesture was life.<\/p>\n
In mid-life, Porter studied briefly with Jacques Maroger and adopted \u201cthe medium\u201d Maroger claimed was the essence of great painting for centuries: it worked, freeing Porter up to be able to put down exactly the sort of marks he needed and additionally it let him then push the paint around without destroying its fresh alla prima <\/i>quality. But his most crucial breakthrough was while he was copying a Tiepolo study in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It led to an encounter that enabled him to achieve the mastery of his last two decades. Justin Spring describes it:<\/p>\n
While at work in the Metropolitan, Porter had an encounter which took on the aspects of personal myth. He was accosted by an odd and unpleasant-looking man, “a little man with very, very bad breath,” a “Belgian painter”* later described as “a Frenchman with a Dutch name who said he had known Degas, Renoir, Bonnard, and Vuillard,” who eventually introduced himself as Georges van Houten. Van Houten, known in Europe simply as Georges Houten, had exhibited nudes and landscapes at the Salon des Independents in Paris beginning in 1910. He told Porter, “You have light in your pictures. Most of those copyists don\u2019t have any light in them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Porter then spent several days taking instruction from him, and what emerged from this serendipitous tutelage was his conviction that a certain quality of light and color were essential to his vision. In his last two decades, and especially the last fifteen years of his life, his work was, as David Shapiro put it, \u201ca religion of light.\u201d He had artistic ancestors in this: Tiepolo, the Impressionists and post-Impressionists, Van Gogh (whose letters Porter treasured), Matisse, when he was living and working on the Riviera, and even his beloved Velasquez in The Surrender at Breda. <\/i>Yet <\/i>in comparison with all of them, in some of his great paintings Porter seemed to have discovered a light amplifier that could be turned up to eleven when theirs only went up to ten. Shadows in his paintings hum with color. There\u2019s virtually no darkness in his field of vision. An illuminated twilight is as dim as it gets when Porter arrived at his final mastery. This is partly what makes Porter so companionable, so accessible to nearly anyone, the way Van Gogh is: both painters exulted in a kind of perpetually illuminated world, indoors and out, in a way that makes everything look as if we\u2019re seeing it for the first time. Everything in Porter is a clean, well-lighted place. Even the most disorderly of tabletops. The world we usually see in his work is friendly, what most of us see in our own mundane daily lives: a tennis game, a county crossroads, a table set for breakfast, a little girl sitting calmly in a chair, or a spouse recovering from illness in bed.<\/p>\n
This is what meets the eye. Yet what is operating in all of this was a state of mind and heart he described as \u201ctransparent.\u201d Few critics have compared Porter\u2019s attitude toward the act of painting with phenomenology, but he attempted to do what the phenomenologists did: put everything known into brackets and simply look with new and unsophisticated eyes at a world available to the senses. He wanted to extirpate thinking and knowledge from the act of painting. He sought a Zen-like state of no mind. He liked David Hume\u2019s observation that all we know is a stream of sense experience. The old Imagist motto fitted well: no ideas but in things<\/i>. Sensory stimulation wasn\u2019t the point: Porter wasn\u2019t a hedonist, though his paintings offer great pleasures. He talks about achieving a certain kind of awareness, a certain quality of paying attention, not to a particular object or place or thing, but in every painting to be as aware as possible of the entirety of the world as it is embodied in unique, eccentric particulars. What he seeks is an almost Proustian awakening for himself and for the viewer. He wants to be aware not just of the unique and particular quiddity of everything he sees, but to the wholeness of the world and life, so that the glimpse he offers of one tiny corner of the cosmos reflects that wholeness: \u201ceverything.\u201d In Proust\u2019s world, a meaningless sip of tea resurrects an entire world. In Porter, as in Van Gogh, a pair of shoes might work just as well. As he told Cummings:<\/p>\n
I like in art when the artist doesn’t know what he knows in general; he only knows what he knows specifically. And what he knows in general or what can be known in general becomes apparent later on by what he has had to put down. And that is to me the most interesting art form…. in other words, you are not in control of nature quite, you are part of nature…. the whole question of art is to be wide awake, to be as attentive as possible.<\/p>\n
For someone who wrote for a living much of his life, and who was also a voluminous reader, he found himself struggling to put into words his most crucial insights. One could say, with a smile, that this was also a problem for Heidegger and Wittgenstein, who both wrestled with the limits of language and thought, who preferred silence to philosophy when it came to the most profound contemplation. The limits of language play a role here. But Porter gets pretty close to articulating how painting begins where thinking ends. His outlook is almost that of a secular mystic: he practiced various forms of meditation in his later years when he was also reading Juliana of Norwich, William James, and Plotinus. Though his wife converted to Catholicism and brought more than one of their children into the Church as well, Porter never dropped the bearing of an atheist, but what he understood about painting and the nature of consciousness was echoed in work by those who had a more conventional view of the spiritual world.<\/p>\n
Without ever putting it this way, Porter was devoted to what the Greeks called nous<\/i>, the seat of awareness in the heart, not the head, an intelligence that isn\u2019t discursive or involved in the logical powers of science or technology. It isn\u2019t feeling or emotion, but a way of beholding the world that, collaterally and secondarily, triggers profound feeling. His work is an attempt to open the eyes of this larger intelligence through moments of sensory perception. He stressed an open, transparent and impersonal state of awareness as the discipline this awakening required, as the foundation of the intense, purposeful application of paint to canvas: it\u2019s why he made pictures, but he understood there was no way to make this kind of awakening happen through method, technique, or repeatable stylistic maneuvers. It couldn\u2019t be taught. In a way it couldn\u2019t be reliably learned<\/i>. He never cites Ralph Waldo Emerson\u2019s metaphor of the \u201ctransparent eyeball,\u201d one of the least felicitous tropes in American lit, but it\u2019s exactly what Porter wanted to become. (Emerson happens to have been one of his wife\u2019s ancestors.)<\/p>\n
His remarks in the Smithsonian interview keep circling around this quasi-mystical approach to paint:<\/p>\n
You get it by following – not by ordering the thing or using your head – but by being unconscious.<\/p>\n
What I admire in Alex Katz’s paintings… I was talking to a young poet, who came around here yesterday. He said he liked my paintings, and he showed me some of his poems. I couldn’t explain to him what I liked in Alex or I didn’t. He thought of him as simply putting down the “thingness” of things. But it isn’t that. Partly what I like in Alex’s pictures when I like them is it reminds me of the first experience, of a first experience in nature, the first experience of seeing. Expressionism doesn’t interest me very much, expressionism as a problem. But visualness interests me very much. It must be that \u201cfirst-timeness.\u201d The world starts in this picture. That’s what I’m interested in doing, I guess.<\/p>\n
When I think art is not silly – and this is not a question at all of “modern” art versus another kind of art, but of the whole activity – it is because I imagine that being an artist also sets an example in opposition to all of the evils and destructiveness of scientific technology, which … I think is at the bottom of all the troubles of the world today. There is no point in going into this at greater length. It is, though, the basis of what I teach, even though only implicit in my criticisms of students\u2019 work. I think we have to begin the world all over again, in opposition to technology and progress. We have to live in such a way that our lives do not separate us from the material world, as technology does. It seems to me that almost everything that is taken unconsciously for granted as important or valuable today is just idea and generality; there is nothing concrete there, no facts. When painting counts for me, there is at least the fact of the paint itself, and when I don’t like it, it is because it is all idea . .<\/p>\n
To say, half a century ago, that technology separates us from the material world is to have seen clearly into a visual future dominated by phantoms on luminous screens. And again, on how thinking and arranging and consciously imposing form is to create chaos not order:<\/p>\n
I see an arrangement I like. All I did was to arrange that chair for me to put one hand on. I thought of that. The rag on the floor was there and I liked it. Almost always in still lifes, I don’t arrange them. This still life was arranged but usually just the way the dishes are on the table at the end of the meal strikes me suddenly. So I paint it. Part of my idea or my feeling about form that’s interesting is that it is discovered. It’s the effect of something unconscious like the dishes are in a certain arrangement at the end of a meal because people without thinking have moved things and then have gone away. I think it’s impossible not to get some sort of form if you don’t think about it. If you do think about it, you can get chaos; but if you don’t think about it, you get form.<\/p>\n
In one sense this goes to the heart of how natural his images are, how natural his handling of paint is. He sees composition and form in what appears as a result of life being lived unselfconsciously. Which is exactly how he wants to build a picture. But this leads deeper into his understanding of consciousness. His most philosophically profound remark, and it comes and goes during the interview without fanfare and much recognition from Cummings, involves a sort of version of the insight that recursive intelligence\u2014a mind that tries to contemplate the entirety of being, the whole of all things as a whole<\/i>, including one\u2019s individual mind and life\u2014is handicapped in a very obvious way. How can the part grasp the whole? It\u2019s like the very funny line from Stephen Wright: \u201cYou can\u2019t have everything. Where would you put it?\u201d What he articulates bears some familial relationship with Godel\u2019s incompleteness theorem, the notion that a system of math can\u2019t prove its own validity as a whole. The only proofs are within the system, not proofs of<\/i> the entire system. A proof is an element of the whole, inside that whole: it\u2019s a part of mathematics and not about math itself being valid or true. The mind can\u2019t behold the entirely of the cosmos, or life, because the mind is operating as an element of that whole, from within it. It can\u2019t get outside the whole in order to see it partly because it can\u2019t step outside itself. As he puts it:<\/p>\n
One of the troubles with the world today- the pollution problems and so on- is that scientists or engineers do not sufficiently understand that the world that they are studying is not outside themselves, but they are part of it. It’s bigger than themselves. They can’t enclose it in their own minds because then it would be smaller than their own minds and it wouldn’t be the totality of the world. In a sense, the value of art today is that it shows people\u2014what science doesn\u2019t\u2014that what is real is everything and nothing less.<\/i><\/p>\n
Which is what remains beyond the reach of the conscious, rational intelligence.<\/p>\n
And then the interview moves on quickly past these fragmented observations which are begging for more elaboration, so it\u2019s a bit like deciphering surviving fragments of Pre-Socratic philosophy. But this foundational insight, if Cummings had queried him to elaborate on it, would have shown how he saw the role of painting. It was a way of establishing (in full recognition of how the logical, discursive intellect can\u2019t possibly gain a view of the entirety of what is) an individual relationship, a \u201cconnection\u201d as he referred to it, with the wholeness of \u201ceverything.\u201d Subconsciously, the work itself offers a small glimpse of the whole, in its wholeness<\/i>. He and Cummings do<\/i> circle back obliquely toward this in one small passage:<\/p>\n
P<\/span>AUL CUMMINGS: So . . . different people see different parts of the elephant as the joke goes. You think really then that painting is more of an emotional thing than an intellectual thing?<\/p>\nFAIRFIELD PORTER: No, I don’t think it’s more emotional or more intellectual. I think it’s a way of making the connection between yourself and everything.<\/p>\n
PAUL CUMMINGS: How do you mean “and everything”?<\/p>\n
FAIRFIELD PORTER: Well I mean “and reality” which is everything. In other words, you connect yourself to everything which includes yourself.<\/p>\n
PAUL CUMMINGS: Through the painting?<\/p>\n
FAIRFIELD PORTER: Yes, by the process of painting; and the person who looks at it gets it vicariously.<\/p>\n
The act of painting smuggles this \u201ceverything\u201d into the work, without the artist consciously being able to control it, or necessarily even being conscious of how or when this happens. Yet viewers see it in ways the artist can\u2019t see it while making the painting. It can\u2019t be willed or planned or reduced to doing something repeatable. But this almost meta-awareness of the everything-ness of everything is what Porter was after, in exactly the way this kind of awakening became central to Proust\u2019s great novel, which Porter owned\u2014though his family were devoted to the great Russian writers\u2014inheriting the translations his mother had bought, one at a time, as each one was published early in the century.<\/p>\n
5<\/p>\n
All of this represents the inner scaffolding for what most of us who love Porter see when we look at his work. It is beautiful in the way that every Japanese haiku poem is beautiful: because it\u2019s virtually lacking in all conventional significance and is absolutely real in a humble, ordinary way. The sound of a frog leaping into a pond is all Basho gives you, but in his brief poem it\u2019s an echo from the beginning of time. In Porter you see your own mundane daily experience in a way that suggests what Porter had to have loved in his reading of Juliana of Norwich when she said \u201cAll shall be well.\u201d What\u2019s so refreshingly distinctive about Porter is how innate and natural his work looks. It gives you the vision of someone who comes back to a familiar home after years in exile or prison, years of being so long away from what\u2019s normal and ordinary that everything is utterly new again, everything is a marvel and a wonder without being anything but what it was before you left. It\u2019s what George Bailey gets when he wakes up from his Clarence-induced dream and sees his life with the eyes of his heart open for the first time.<\/p>\n
Porter doesn\u2019t strive for effect. If anything he makes his color as unspectacular as possible, and yet the result is exactly what\u2019s required. He shows you just what\u2019s there, but radically simplified in a way that is far from photorealism and yet occasionally appears to be a dramatically simplified distillation of a photograph. He wouldn\u2019t admit to ever using a camera, but some of his best paintings, such as the glimpse of a tennis foursome awaiting an imminent serve, had to have been drawn from a photograph, and yet he still painted these as he painted anything from life, except it’s more accurate. That convincing precision of line and proportion afford great pleasure in combination with his sense of color. This compromise he undoubtedly found between the photorealism emerging around him and his early, much looser methods had to have been incredibly gratifying to paint. These paintings, including his homage to Las Meninas<\/i>, could never have been considered candidates for the incinerator. The most distinctive of these few paintings, likely guided by snapshots, are The Tennis Game, Portrait of Nancy Porter Strauss, Lizzie and Bruno<\/i>, maybe House with Three Chimneys,<\/i> The Sweater<\/i>, Interior with a Dress Pattern<\/i>, Long Island Landscape with Red Building, <\/i>and especially The Cove. <\/i>There is a second tier of paintings that look slightly less accurate in draftsmanship but nearly as precise and appear to have been constructed carefully and methodically in terms of the drawing, and they belong among his best in this group: October Interior <\/i>and July Interior,<\/i> Summer Studio<\/i>, Early Morning, Iced Coffee <\/i>(on view at Zwirner), Columbus Day, Island Farmhouse, The Screen Porch, Table at Night, The Harbor, Great Spruce Head, <\/i>and of course The Mirror. <\/i><\/p>\n
It has been decades since I first saw a reproduction of The Cove<\/i>, from 1964, and I hardly paused to look at it that first time, and I\u2019ve spent little time studying it over the years since then. At first it looks a bit washed out, there is a lot of tan and brown and very muted greens. Only in the past few years have I begun to marvel at the quality of the painting, its marvelous marriage of precision of line and proportion with painterly brushwork. I\u2019m convinced Porter had to have been working from a snapshot he took while walking along the Maine shore, probably with James Schuyler. Everything is indicated with the most generalized tones, eliminating all details under a certain threshold, a threshold set very high in favor of uniform shapes without detail, as it is in almost all of his work. Even what serves as detail, the shape and position of rocks, the figure\u2019s socks, the rolled sleeves of the lavender shirt, are all generalized and hardly indicated, but they are there<\/i> and vividly alive.<\/p>\n
In this painting, as with the others mentioned above, he creates a stunningly convincing and realistic vision of a young man, maybe James Schuyler based on the shape of the head and body, walking carefully among stones revealed by the receding tide. The light, which at first looks washed out, is reflected off everything in the scene from a high sun in a blue sky at mid-day. You can feel it\u2019s a hot summer day, heat radiating off the stones underfoot. Everything about this painting is perfectly executed according to Porter\u2019s uniquely defined method of painting, arrived at personally, through trial and error. There\u2019s nothing meretricious in it, nothing that adheres to what would be commercially or critically viable, though the praise and recognition he\u2019d received in the previous four years had to have given him immense confidence as the painting unfolded and he could see that things were coming out exactly as he wanted.<\/p>\n
The rocks ought to look like a mess, there\u2019s so little distinction among them and almost no variation in color between the stony shoreline and the color of his figure\u2019s khaki shorts. You could look at this painting and not even see<\/i> the figure at first glance, and yet when you do<\/i> see him, he immediately becomes spacially distinct\u2014the effect is almost like a children\u2019s book where as you open the page the figure or building or rocket made of folded cardboard rises up vertically from its flat surrounding page. He becomes the axis for everything on the exposed strip of littoral debris. The water in the cove is almost a uniform passage of gray, reflecting the sky, with a spiny border of dark green reflection of the distant tree line. That strip of dull green at the top is done in a brighter value, so that it recedes behind the cove, while an evergreen in the foreground is dark. Everything is done in the mid-tones, so that the hot sunlight radiates off the canvas, even though nothing is painted in pure white even in the clouds over the remote hill. There are so many ways this painting could have gone wrong, especially in the hollows and bumps of that shoreline (Thomas Hart Benton smiles), but somehow the spots of color, most almost identical with the spots around them, are perfectly defined in the most abbreviated way. The scene is so alive\u2014the only word that Porter wanted to be able to say about any work of art\u2014that you can walk into it. And you wish you could do that.<\/p>\n
His greatness falls into two other categories as well, and one of them is what he was really after all of his life, where the painterly gesture takes precedence over linear accuracy but the scene is all the more alive as a result. He puts down one spot of color next to another, as Hawthorne put it, and the gestures of mark-making define the lines and forms of his images, likely done without any graphite sketch on the blank canvas. These had to be in a category where many of his attempts made it into the incinerator, because the process of painting them almost looks like a sport relying on instantaneous reactions, unpredictable mixing of colors, and rapid execution. One might smile and call it bullfighting with the blank canvas. That metaphor certainly fits de Kooning\u2019s combat with canvas. These paintings are likely the ones he found himself most happy he had painted. Among them would be the incredible Still Life with White Boats<\/i>, the equally dazzling Self-Portrait in the Studio<\/i>, Apples and Roses,<\/i> Flowers by the Sea<\/i>, and a long series of still life in a format he returned to many times with transcendent results, tabletops strewn with random objects back-lit by windows, as well as the view through the screened-in porches around the Porter house in Maine. This format, still life in foreground and landscape through windows in the background, gave him a grid behind the objects in the foreground, rectangles of light organized by the frames and muntins of the windows aiming light into the viewer\u2019s eyes. Three paintings in particular represent the kind of spontaneous perfection he could achieve when everything was working: the above-mentioned Still Life with White Boats,<\/i> as well as a watercolor painted in his final year titled simply Still Life<\/i>, in the Seavest Collection, and maybe the most beautiful image he ever created, The Table on the Porch<\/i>, in 1971. What he achieved in the subtle and various use of color in these images goes beyond even the greatest color harmonies in his more laboriously painted work. The use of color for small details in the objects in Still Life <\/i>is astonishingly accomplished and suggested work that awaited if only he hadn\u2019t died so suddenly at a premature age. Again, he was much like Manet, moving up to the next level in his work, both with color and mastery of his brushwork, just as he was robbed of a chance to explore it.<\/p>\n
A third category of his work, a small group of seascapes build on the nearly abstract images he\u2019d painted earlier of the harbor visible from his house in Maine. This brief series of small paintings is so free in its brushwork and yet so visually accurate in the way it presents the values and tones of ocean waves that it\u2019s as close to pure abstraction as Porter ever got. The images are as simple as they could possibly be, lacking in nearly all detail one usually sees in paintings of ocean waves, yet at a glance they are utterly convincing and real: A Sudden Change of Wind, The Ocean,<\/i> and Morning After a Storm.<\/i> They were painted in the early 70s, and are a corollary of these last very loose still lifes, but this little series conveys a sense of the eternal, an almost impersonal awareness of the cosmic, even while being simplified and quite literal depictions of how gentle, low tides move in and retreat on an Atlantic shore.<\/p>\n
What makes Fairfield Porter radical, in a way unlike the monotonously thought-up and ostensibly revolutionary -isms that sprang up after Impressionism, is that he paints in a way that is entirely natural, unselfconsciously responsive to what he saw around him in his life. Many of his paintings are mediocre or unrealized. But the great work emerges almost randomly, year after year from the late 50s on. His whole project makes him the most trustworthy American painter in the 20th century. It\u2019s as if, were the entire history of painting to disappear and one person were to pick up a brush and apply paint to canvas for the first time 70 years ago, something quite like Porter\u2019s work would have likely emerged. He does what\u2019s natural and spontaneous, without belaboring anything because he sees something he wants to remember. He abandoned the whole \u201ctotalitarian,\u201d (as some characterized art criticism in his time) superstructure of intellectually governed art\u2014art that becomes an illustration for an idea or a political viewpoint or simply a rigidly uniform school of painting, and thus serves as fodder for critics. He painted without a thought in his head, as a means of silent contemplation, in a direct relationship with the world he saw, with the \u201ceverything\u201d of which he was a part. In protest to this notion, one can name the long list of work from the past that imprinted itself on his soul, starting with Giotto and Piero della Francesca, as well as all the artists whose work freed him up to do what he finally achieved, but his own work could easily have been done without any antecedents at all. It is the most human and unpretentious response of one individual to his own experience one can imagine, purposely lacking in intellectual justification, devoid of any discursive significance or meaning, and it\u2019s this uniquely ingenuous quality that recommends him as a way out of what ails so much visual art now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Note: This essay is dependent, for the facts of Porter\u2019s life, on two excellent biographies, Fairfield Porter, A Life in Art by Justin Spring and another biography which serves as text for a catalog of his work, Fairfield Porter, An American Classic, by John Spike. I have yet to footnote all of what I\u2019ve drawn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
Alive and well: Fairfield Porter\u2019s Unique, Radical Wisdom - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=10912\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Alive and well: Fairfield Porter\u2019s Unique, Radical Wisdom - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Note: This essay is dependent, for the facts of Porter\u2019s life, on two excellent biographies, Fairfield Porter, A Life in Art by Justin Spring and another biography which serves as text for a catalog of his work, Fairfield Porter, An American Classic, by John Spike. 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![\"\"](\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/porter-817x1024.jpg\")
Note: This essay is dependent, for the facts of Porter\u2019s life, on two excellent biographies, <\/i>Fairfield Porter, A Life in Art by Justin Spring and another biography which serves as text for a catalog of his work, <\/i>Fairfield Porter, An American Classic, by John Spike. I have yet to footnote all of what I\u2019ve drawn from those books here, but intend to. Also, I\u2019ve drawn from the 1968 interview by Paul Cummings archived at the Smithsonian. This has to be the longest post I\u2019ve done, but it could easily be much longer.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n