Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter was an artist and art critic who bridged that gap between Social Realism of the 1930s and Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s.

Fairfield Porter was born in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois on June 10, 1907. He was the fourth of five children. His father was an architect. His mother helped run the Porter family real estate business and encouraged her children to view and appreciate art.

Porter graduated from Harvard in 1928. He moved to New York and continued his studies at the Art Students League, where one of his teachers was Thomas Hart Benton. 

After a trip to museums and galleries in Europe in 1931, Porter returned to the U.S. and became interested in politics and art criticism.

In 1932, Porter married poet Anne Channing. The couple had five children and divided their time between New York, Southampton and his family home in Great Spruce Head Island in Maine.

He painted portraits of his family and the landscape around Great Spruce Head Island. Although his paintings were figurative and expressionistic, as a critic he was very supportive of the Abstract Expressionist painters whose works dominated the art world in the 1950s and 1960s, when he wrote for Art News.

His painting style had an influence on artists like Alex Katz and Neil Welliver and his critical praise brought attention to the works of Jasper Johns, Joan Mitchell and Larry Rivers.

The first retrospective exhibition of his art was held from 1974 to 1975. The exhibit traveled to the Heckscher Museum on Long Island, the Queens Museum in Flushing, New York, and the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey.

Porter died on September 15, 1975. A retrospective of his works was organized by the Boston Museum of Fine Art in 1983. Anne Porter donated a large collection of Porter’s work to the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York, not far from the family home in Southampton.

His works are included in the permanent collections of the Met, the Smithsonian, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Whitney, MoMA and many other major museums and galleries.