The Indispensible Fairfield Porter
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
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.