The poet John Ashbery has gone publicly on the record as hailing Fairfield Porter (died 1975) as "perhaps the major American artist of this century". Which is certainly talking big, even allowing for the fact that Ashbery was a personal friend of Porter's and was possibly shouting a little in order to be heard.
There have, after all, been many excellent American artists in the last century, or even half-century, and in Europe Porter has scarcely been heard of. I have never seen a picture by him in any European collection, public or private, nor indeed have I seen any outside New York. Is he, then, too all-American to travel, like his predecessors Charles Burchfield and Edwin Dickinson?
There have been at least two other books on him inside the last few years, but this is the most complete as a biographical study, and in general the most satisfying (it is also modestly priced). Though for most of his life Porter lived and painted on the East Coast, he was born in Chicago of a wealthy and cultured family, went on to Harvard and then, like so many young men at the time, became enamoured of the political Left. This took him through Europe on a visit to Russia, during which he met Trotsky at a kind of impromptu press conference. However, Porter was too much the independent-minded Yankee to become a card-carrying Communist, though he remained vocally radical for the rest of his life and took an active role in fighting pollution.
He was fortunate in his marriage to Anne Channing, a cultured girl who wrote poetry, kept her own counsel, and remained devoted to him up to his sudden death (of heart failure) at 67. Porter's vocation as a painter was never in doubt, but his talent was; few major artists have started off so laboriously and so unpromisingly. The stodgy American social realism of the period is almost parodied in his early pictures, giving little signs of the self-assurance and light-filled canvases of his mature years. It is possible, and even probable, that his development was hampered by the traumatic discovery that his eldest son, John, was mentally retarded and almost autistic. Porter and his self-sacrificing wife devoted at least a decade of their life to attempts to cure him, until they gave up in nervous exhaustion and John was more or less institutionalised.
From the start, however, Porter made influential friends in the art world, and he was plainly a man of integrity and intellectual courage. These ranged from the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, one of the great pioneers and patron saints of American Modernism, to people of the Abstract Expressionist generation such as Willem de Kooning. In fact, Porter spanned three generations in his friendships, since he was also close to such post-abstract figures as Alex Katz, Larry Rivers and Jane Freilicher. Equally important, he formed close friendships with younger poets, including Ashbery as mentioned, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara and James Schuyler.
The last-named, however, became more than a friend. Porter apparently had a strong bisexual streak (a fact of which I had been totally unaware), and he and Schuyler became lovers - a relationship which nearly tore his marriage apart and placed a considerable strain on his five children. By this time Porter had taken to spending much time on Great Spruce Island, off the coast of Maine, where his architect-father had built a house and left it to his family. The island became a centrepiece in the painter's life and also in that of his children, whom he painted there again and again.
Schuyler's long stays there were a source of growing friction, especially when he began to show signs of mental disturbance and eventually had to be hospitalised. Their love affair died a natural death, but Porter continued to worry about Schuyler's welfare almost to the end. The fact that his wife tolerated the relationship, and even helped to look after Schuyler in his worst moments, makes her appear almost a latter-day saint. Meanwhile, they had acquired a house in the fashionable Hamptons, an elite area close to New York, which helped to diffuse the strain on one and all.
Porter's realist style put him wildly out of step with most of his abstractionist contemporaries, so for years he was forced to write art criticism to make ends meet. However, subterranean support for him was strong and committed (his poet-friends helped), and in the end he enjoyed growing success and even a modest degree of fame. Since his death that fame has spiralled, though as I have mentioned, it has yet to spread to Europe. His starting point was Vuillard, whom he considered as important as Cezanne, but his sensibility is thoroughly modern, even if it took him long years to tune his technical ability to the same level as his vision.
Though uneven, and at times curiously clumsy, he painted his quota of masterpieces, some of which are already as popular (in reproduction) with Americans as the works of Georgia O'Keeffe or Andrew Wyeth, or even Edward Hopper. Porter is, in effect, an American intimiste and a key figure in what has been called Painterly Realism; as such, his influence continues to grow along with his reputation. So please, let us have no more academic-journalistic nonsense for the moment about the so-called "death of painting" - it is, on the contrary, very much alive, and this welcome book is a proof of it.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic