Word: portering
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...reticent Yankee patrician, the Harvard-educated offspring of a family that once owned much of the farmland on which the Chicago Loop now stands, Fairfield Porter was always a bit of an anomaly in the New York art world. He doesn't fit the standard profile of postwar American painting. People thought -- and to a degree, some now think -- that his work was "soft": civil and private, figurative in a time of heroic abstraction, obsessed with the invocation of natural beauty. But scratch its agreeable surface, and there is flint below, and an unquenchable heat of pictorial intelligence...
...Porter was largely self-taught. From the time he found his feet as an artist -- around the mid-1950s -- he stayed away from Manhattan, preferring to paint in Southampton and on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine, which his family owned. This didn't put him out of contact with "the scene." Porter was an exceptionally gifted critic who, in Art News and the Nation, produced some of the most lucid and cant-free essays on modern art in general, and Willem de Kooning's work in particular, ever penned by an American. But he knew his own mind...
...Porter rejected the avant-gardist piety that the empirically painted figure or landscape was dead. It simply didn't accord with his convictions about how art relates to experience and conveys its "density," a favorite word. Nowhere does his work show a sign of the metaphysical yearnings of the New York school, still less its primitivism. Porter's was very much a modernist vision, but classically so; its main source was Paris, and its exemplars were the great Intimists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. From them, as Agee notes in his catalog essay, Porter learned to "paint what you know...
Aspects of the work of older American artists recur in Porter's work: Marsden Hartley's love of bony mass, Edward Hopper's treatment of light. But there were very great differences. Porter was a more nuanced and daring colorist than Hartley; his world is more lyric than Hopper's, and on the whole untouched by melancholy. It is also more generalized in treatment. In a large painting like Island Farmhouse, 1969, the white weatherboard asserts itself in a blast of light like a Doric temple; the lines of shadow are a burning visionary yellow; everything, from the angular...
...Porter's feeling for the old masters, and his oblique way of quoting them -- testing himself against them -- is quite explicit in a painting like The Mirror, 1966. It is his homage to Velazquez's Las Meninas. A young girl sits with her back to a large mirror, propped up behind her in the studio. The mirror reflects her back and, beyond that, the painter, whose posture recalls the image of the distant chamberlain at the end of Velazquez's long chamber. And yet, once you have figured out its setup, seen that the window with its blurred blaze...