Appreciating Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter is a painter of great refinement and subtlety. He has a strong technique and a wonderful sense of place…. The realistic world he painted always had a great deal of style. - Alex Katz

 

The novel, About Schmidt, tells the story of retired lawyer Albert Schmidt, a bit of a curmudgeon, whose well-ordered life in Southhampton has been upset by the death of his wife and his tenuous relationship with his only daughter, of whose marriage he does not approve. He realizes that his wife was the one who kept their social life going and their house in order. 

 

Schmidt visits his oldest, closest…and only friend…who lives nearby. The author describes the visit as comforting, comfortable, buoyed by service of wine and bourbon and the work of Fairfield Porter:

 

With a new and insistent feeling of benevolence, Schmidt surveyed the neat bookshelves, the Fairfield Porter watercolor of Gil, done in the garden behind the house where Gil had lived when he was still married to Ann, the predictable but sound arrangement of furniture and Gil and Elaine themselves. - 

Louis Begley. About Schmidt, 1996

 

That simple paragraph says a lot about the work of Fairfield Porter. His paintings of family and friends and the Southhampton landscape evoke a feeling of tranquility. 

 

 

Porter came from a family whose members were bright and creative. His father was an architect, his mother a poet. His older brother was a photographer and poet T.S. Eliot was his cousin. Father, brother, cousin, and Porter himself, earned their degrees at Harvard.

 

During much of his career, Porter was better known as a valuable art critic than as an artist himself. He championed the next generation of representational painters working in figurative and realist styles, like Alex Katz (b. 1927), who had a difficult time competing in the art world, at times, with Abstract Expressionists.  Porter's critiques were important to the flow of movements of art in America, creating a link between the developments movements like Social Realism of the 1930s and Neo-Expressionism of the 1980s.

 

Like Milton Avery (1885-1965), Porter’s works were not fully appreciated during his lifetime, and became highly desirable when retrospectives were held after his death. 

 

Porter died in 1975, at age 68. His widow, Anne Channing Porter, donated many of his paintings to major museums and more than 200 works to the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton. 

 

Fairfield Porter’s works can be found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the MFA, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, among other major venues.

 

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

 

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  References:

Louis Begley. About Schmidt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

Jane Borthwick. Fairfield Porter: Brief life of an American realist artist and critic: 1907-1975. Harvard Magazine. September 19, 2024.

Hilton Kramer. Fairfield Porter Gets Some of What Critics Owe Him. The Observer. June 30, 2003.

July 2, 2025