13 facts about Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter (June 10, 1907 – September 18, 1975) was an American painter and art critic. He was the fourth of five kids of James Porter, an architect, and Ruth Furness Porter, a poet from a scholarly family. He was the brother of photographer Eliot Porter and the brother-in-law of federal Reclamation Commissioner Michael W. Straus.

While a student at Harvard, Porter majored in fine arts; he continued his studies at the Art Students’ League like he moved to New York City in 1928. His studies at the Art Students’ League predisposed him to build socially relevant art and, although the subjects would change, he continued to manufacture realist do its stuff for the get off of his career. He would be criticized and revered for continuing his representational style among the Abstract Expressionist movement.

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His subjects were primarily landscapes, domestic interiors and portraits of family, friends and fellow artists, many of them affiliated following the New York School of writers, including John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. Many of his paintings were set in or vis-а-vis the intimates summer house on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine and the family home at 49 South Main Street, Southampton, New York.

His painterly vision, which encompassed a assimilation with flora and fauna and the deed to declare extraordinariness in unsigned life, was heavily indebted to the French painters Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard. John Ashbery wrote of him: “Characteristically, [Porter] tended to select the late woolly Vuillards to the to the fore ones everyone likes”.

Porter said once, “When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to announce what Bonnard said Renoir told him: ‘make all more beautiful.'”

Porter bequeathed roughly 250 of his works to the Parrish Art Museum.

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