Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art, 1907-1975. (Learning from Exhibitions)

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Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) was a fascinating, complex and distinctive American painter who produced Intimist-inspired Realist work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

While most of the American and European artists were exploring and challenging previous techniques and movements through abstractionism, expressionism, minimalism and conceptualism, Porter successfully fused a unique American vision out of two disparate styles.

From the turn-of-the-century French painters like Bonnard and Vuillard, both Impressionist and Intimist in style, Porter developed an intimate, sensual and representational approach which he capably combined with current characteristics of contemporary art: color, gesture and abstraction.

Thus, although he is generally regarded as a painter of family and friends, Porter's personal path promoted the poetic significance of everyday life and a theoretical fusion of paint application and composition.

This vision, singular to Porter, made for a significant achievement in art-historical terms, and made him "perhaps the major American artist of this century," according to poet and critic John Ashbery. Besides being an innovative painter, Porter, himself, also was a prolific poet and art critic. He was an intelligent and engaged philosopher-artist who knew art and artists, writers and …