Fairfield Porter

Artist, art critic, and poet Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) is recognized as a major twentieth-century American Intimist painter, whose body of work features lyrical depictions of everyday life and portraits of family members and friends, in the manner of the late-nineteenth-century French artists Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, whose paintings Porter greatly admired. He successfully produced realist work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He has since been hailed by John...See more

Artist, art critic, and poet Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) is recognized as a major twentieth-century American Intimist painter, whose body of work features lyrical depictions of everyday life and portraits of family members and friends, in the manner of the late-nineteenth-century French artists Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, whose paintings Porter greatly admired. He successfully produced realist work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement. He has since been hailed by John Ashbery as "perhaps the major American artist of this century." Justin Spring's excellent recent biography, A Life in Art tells Porter's life story--integrating it with his art, art criticism, and poetry--and proves Ashbery's claim. Spring chronicles Porter's upbringing in a wealthy family; his education at Harvard; his youthful travels in Europe and Stalinist Russia; his marriage to Anne Channing Porter, a poet; his bohemian lifestyle, his work as a painter and art critic in New York; and his association with major figures of the American modernist movement, both artists (Alfred Stieglitz, John Marin, Willem de Kooning, and Alex Katz) and poets (John Wheelwright, Kenneth Rexroth, Frank O'Hara, and, finally, James Schuyler, who lived with the Porters for over a decade). See less