Fairfield Porter

American, 1907 - 1975

(not assigned)Southampton, New York, USA

SchoolRealism

Biography(b Winnetka, IL, 10 June 1907; d Southampton, NY, 18 Sept 1975).
American painter, printmaker and writer. He was the son of American architect James Porter (d 1939). He studied fine art at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, from 1924 to 1928 and spent the next two years studying painting and mural art under Thomas Hart Benton at the Art Students League in New York. He travelled extensively between 1927 and 1932, especially in Europe, where he came into contact with socialism. In 1935, while working as editor of the short-lived American socialist tabloid Arise, he began to write art criticism-an interest that culminated in his position as associate editor at ARTnews (from 1951) and as a frequent contributor to periodicals such as The Nation.
As a figurative painter Porter was particularly influenced by an exhibition held in 1938 of work by Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard at the Art Institute of Chicago, which provided the impetus for his emphasis on colour relations. He painted consistently in a schematized realist style, favouring figure studies and domestic scenes often on a small scale, as in Seated Boy (463×356 mm, c. 1938; Southampton, NY, Parrish A. Mus.). By the mid-1950s, in works such as Katie and Anne (2.04×1.58 m, 1955; Washington, DC, Hirshhorn), he had expanded the scale of his most ambitious pictures while remaining faithful in his preference for quiet domestic interiors to the sources of his art in late 19th-century Intimisme. In this sense there was a close connection with the contemporaneous work of his friend Larry Rivers. During the 1960s and 1970s he relied increasingly on the impact of vivid colour in broad patches, for example in the Screen Porch (1972; New York, Whitney), retaining his fidelity to the motif while emphasizing the abstract formal qualities of the composition. His brother Eliot Porter (b 1901) was prominent as a landscape photographer specializing in colour photography. (Source: JOHN D. KISSICK, "Fairfield Porter," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press, Accessed July 15, 2004), )

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