Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz: Mutual Admiration

I can’t think of anything more exciting than the surface of things. Just appearance. - Alex Katz

The right use of color can make any composition work. - Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter was born in 1907, Alex Katz in 1927. Although they were a generation apart, their lives and their sensibilities were similar and they shared a mutual admiration for each others work.

 

Porter was born in Illinois and studied art at Harvard and the Art Students League. Thomas Hart Benton was one of his teachers at the League.  Katz was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens and studied at Cooper Union.

 

Both Porter and Katz painted the people and landscapes around them and were criticized for not doing Abstract Expressionist works, the art movement that had taken hold in the 1940s and ‘50s.

 

Porter moved from New York City to Southampton in 1949, where he raised his family, spending summers in Maine.

 

Katz moved into his SoHo home and studio in 1968, where he still lives and works and spends summers in Maine.

 

 

Both artists focused their works on the family, friends and landscapes closest to them.

 

Although Katz has voiced his anger with art critics, Porter was a respected critic, who worked for Art News from 1951 to 1967 and admired Katz's work.

 

In 1960, Porter wrote of Katz, “In his portraits the likeness does not “stop” the paint.  The most ordinary and flattest gray, mixed only from black and white, has the radiance of violet.  The green of a real, living plant in the gallery looks less alive than the actually rather abstract green of the foliage in his landscapes.”

 

In his 2018 book, Looking at Art with Alex Katz, Katz wrote, “Fairfield Porter is a painter of great refinement and subtlety. He has a strong technique and a wonderful sense of place, and is skillful in combining local surfaces with an all-over light, particularly in some of his still lifes. He has a tendency to go for all-over painting, and the images, which are interesting and intelligent, suffer. I find the painting more interesting than the images. The realistic world he painted always had a great deal of style.

 

“Fairfield made me feel I was okay. He called up and visited. We disagreed on almost every painter, but he wrote about me and was very supportive. It made me feel that my paintings were okay; it gave me confidence. In a Whitney Biennial I had a large face of Edwin I was surprised that Fairfield liked. He said it was the best painting in the show.”

 

Both Fairfield’s and Katz’s works bridged the gap between abstract and figuration. Both were under-appreciated by critics…and both have had successful careers as artists, in spite of the lack of early critical acclaim.

 

Both artists' works are in major museums around the world. The Colby Museum of Art in Maine has a wing which is dedicated solely to the work of Katz. Porter Fairfield’s work is also in Colby’s permanent collection…donated by Alex Katz.

 

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Please contact us if you would like more information about the works of Fairfield Porter and Alex Katz available at Surovek Gallery.

 

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February 27, 2025