Justin Spring

D escribed by John Ashbery as "perhaps the major American artist of this century,"
Fairfield Porter is a painter whose significant achievement, in the most narrow art-
historical terms, was to create a distinctively American vision out of a style of
painting--intimate, sensual, and representational--which had previously been explored
by the French painters Vuillard and Bonnard. In fact, Porter was more: a philosopher-
painter who spent his entire adult life actively participating in a wide range of American
art and literary scenes not just as an artist, but as a critic, poet, observer, supporter,
collector, and devoted friend. His life story demonstrates a rare continuity within the
history of American art, for Porter wrote brilliantly and perceptively about the world
which surrounded him from the time of his 1928 arrival (at age twenty-one) in New
York from a prosperous suburb of Chicago, until the time of his death in Southampton,
Long Island, in 1975. There were few, if any, movements within American art during
this fifty-year period with which he was unfamiliar, and he was personally acquainted
with many of the era's most interesting artists. He had a firsthand awareness of nearly
all of Western art, from ancient Greece through Picasso, and his lifelong immersion
in the conflicting theories of art which were advanced in America from the mid-1920s
onwards gave him a rare breadth and depth of knowledge which informs not only
his criticism but also his remarkable personal correspondence. Yet while well versed in
artistic, literary, and political theory, he was beholden to no particular school; anti-
academic, and valuing plain talk above all else, he preferred art to ideologies and
painting to criticism. Because as an artist and critic he was slow to develop and even
slower to realize anything approximating success, he spent a significant part of his
life looking at, thinking about, and often publishing his thoughts on other people's
art. As a result, Porter's biography is more than just the story of a man who made
memorable paintings; it is also the story of a man of encyclopedic intelligence who
was vitally engaged in the development of American art and art criticism for over half
a century.

The story of this artist's life is also a chronicle of a brilliant and talented man, beset
by personal demons, who considered himself a failure for the first forty years of his
life, and who only in his last twenty-five years began to realize his extraordinary talents
as an artist and critic. A reserved and somewhat private person, Porter was nonetheless
an engaging correspondent who shared details of his life as easily and openly as he
shared his home. His letters--clear, direct, affectionate--reveal a side of his personality

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