The Indispensible Fairfield Porter

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The New York Sun

Fairfield Porter’s elegant paintings were the subject of a 1983 retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston that at once permanently elevated his reputation and ensconced him into a period of modernist figuration that curators have been neglecting, in one form or another, for decades. Fairfield Porter: Raw at the Middlebury College Museum of Art afforded an unusual opportunity to see his work assembled in a serious way.

Subtitled The Creative Process of an American Master, the exhibition took a matter-of-fact approach to the Porter holdings of the Parrish Museum in Southampton, New York, where it originated. The Parrish owns a bequest of Porters, given to the museum by the artist’s wife after his death, that includes several seminal pieces and others that the artist abandoned in mid-construction. A wide variety of serendipitous passages cropped up frequently in his work. This is no surprise, as he had one of the greatest flairs for handling oil paint of any 20th-century artist, his shortcomings as a draughtsman notwithstanding. Of note is that he elected to preserve some of them in their unresolved state and move on to other canvases.

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Franklin Einspruch is an artist and writer.


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