The Bond Between Four Quiet Rebels of Modern American Art

In a legendary dispute in the 1950s, art critic Clement Greenberg told Willem de Kooning, “You can’t paint figuratively today. In today's world, it's impossible to paint a face.” De Kooning's response was, ”That's right. And it's impossible not to.”

 

When de Kooning told his friend, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) of Greenberg’s comments, Porter said,  “I thought, ‘If that’s what Greenberg says, I will do exactly what he says I can’t do.’ I might have become an abstract painter except for that remark.”

 

 

Porter, who studied at Harvard and the Art Students’ League, also  became a well-known art critic. He wrote for Art News and The Nation during the period in America when Abstract Expressionism dominated the art world, Porter maintained his realistic figurative and landscape style and supported those artists who did the same.

 

When Wolf Kahn (1927-2020) had his first solo show at the Hansa Gallery in 1953, Porter wrote, in ArtNews, “the excellence of this first exhibition…comes as no surprise.” 

 

 

In Wolf Kahn’s America: An Artist’s Travels, Kahn wrote about a discussion he had with Porter while he watched Porter painting a landscape at Penobscot Bay. “I was watching him paint a view of the Island’s “little harbor” – just a dock sticking out into deep water. He had indicated the farther islands, the water, the sky and the dock. In the foreground he painted a small gas tank and the pipes leading to it. “Fairfield,” I said, “why don’t you leave out the tank and the plumbing?” He turned to me angrily, “You don’t understand what I do at all when you speak like that. I’m not some esthetician who censors the landscape – I’m painting my field of vision. How do I know whether the stuff you don’t like isn’t what holds the whole thing together?”

 

Kahn also wrote an article for the College Art Journal called “Milton Avery’s Good Example.” “Avery (1885-1965) painted one painting in the morning and one in the afternoon, but never really worried too much about the quality of any one of them. He figured that if he just kept working, some of them would be good, which I think is a brilliant idea.” he said in an interview in the Brooklyn Rail. “To me, Avery wasn’t anywhere near abstract. It’s just that he got simpler.”

 

 

In 1961, Greenberg wrote a critique of Avery’s work, saying, “Painters and even collectors have paid more attention, so far, to Avery than critics or museum people have, and his reputation is not yet a firmly established one.”

 

Like Porter, Kahn and Avery, Alex Katz (b. 1927) stuck to his figurative and landscape painting, despite the art world’s focus on the abstract. “The biggest problem with critics is that they have a morality from another time period with which they judge my paintings. The critics who responded to my work in the 1950s were James Schuyler, Frank O’Hara, Edwin Denby, Fairfield Porter. I didn’t exist for Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg. Clement Greenberg actually went out of his way to say how lousy I was. Perhaps that meant that I did exist, after all.”

 

 

Katz appreciated Porter's support. “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.”

 

Museums, galleries and critics were slow to recognize the masterful works of  Fairfield Porter, Wolf Kahn, Milton Avery and Alex Katz who remained true to their individual styles. Today their works are in major museums around the world and usually garner above auction estimates.

 

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Please contact us if you would like more information about the works of these fine artists, available at Surovek Gallery. 

 

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References:

Nancy Pick. Your Life at Amherst—In 1971. Amherst College. August 9, 2021.

Amherst College. Frost and Snow. View From the Campus. Winter, 2025.

Terry Teachout. Portrait of a Painter. The Core. College Magazine o the University of Chicago. Spring/Summer 2009.

Lucinda Franks. Unlocking the Unconscious. ARTnews, December 2001.

Christina Kee. “Daring, Bright, Courageous”: Wolf Kahn, 1927-2020. Art critical. April 18, 2020.

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

Tim Keane. The Contrarian Modernism of Fairfield Porter. Hyperallergic. May 25, 2019.

Wolf Kahn with David Kapp and Robert Berlind. The Brooklyn Rail. May 2007.

Alex Katz. Looking at Art with Alex Katz. Laurence King. October 2018.

September 12, 2025