Fairfield Porter’s Lush, Lonely Vision of the World

Thankfully, in the sixties, a light flips on. An extreme case is “Oak Tree” (1969), where sunlight crashes through the branches onto the grass and becomes its own radioactive organism. There’s a whole subgenre of these high-contrast works in Porter’s late style, but my favorites are pieces like “Untitled (View Outside Southampton Studio)” (1968) and “Amherst Campus No. 1” (1969), with their cartographic splotches of foliage. It hadn’t occurred to me until seeing “Amherst” at the Parrish Art Museum, a decade ago, that a painter could use color as a chronological instrument. In “Untitled,” a row of yellow-green trees are painted so phosphorescently on top of the other layers that they effectively chirp: Look here first! Only then can your eye move to the brick-red house, the pale sky, the pockets of shadow. The effect is to re-create not the trees but the flow of the painter’s own aesthetic experience.

Porter credited the Impressionists with being the first to use color as a vehicle of subjectivity, and Bonnard and Vuillard with intensifying that subjectivity, painting their private lives with an anything-goes palette. But the colorist who gave Porter an extra edge was Willem de Kooning. In the fifties, when de Kooning started doing his big, slashing abstractions with wide housepainter’s brushes, Porter said they recalled landscapes in which the colors are “intensely themselves, as if each color had been freed to be.” Colors didn’t have to represent reality or make concessions to it; they were packets of immediate sensation. Porter said he found his own feelings in de Kooning’s hues: a patch of blue expressed the delight of a Maine summer; pink was the way he felt on the seacoast; a harmony of warm tones bottled up the sensation of autumn. He once compared de Kooning’s use of paint to the “perfect orgasm.”

Most artists enchanted with de Kooning try to paint like him. But Porter somehow passed through the needle’s eye of abstraction and returned to his own eccentric realism on the other side, churning out images of starched Southampton interiors and Penobscot Bay. There are pieces in the show, like “Islands” (1968) and “View from the Front” (ca. 1969), where you can see Porter using what he called the “dry speed” of de Kooning’s brushwork. In “Islands,” there’s an excellent sky-blue brushstroke that horizontally slices the green bush (or is it a tree?) near the middle of the painting. That single stroke implies either that the water is behind the shrub, visible only in patches through the leaves, or that we’re looking at a retinal afterimage of the water over the shrub, as the painter swivels his head between the landscape and the canvas. There’s also a little geyser on the far left, shooting upward like the vertical blast of paint through de Kooning’s “Merritt Parkway” (1959). Ocean spray doesn’t look that way, but it feels like it.

Good painters rarely make good critics, but Porter was both. His writing was rhetorically pungent and had a rare jargon-free poetry. His most exotic idea was to delete fiftyish years of art history and suggest that Impressionism—not Cubism or Surrealism or any other stylistic eruption—was the real forerunner of Abstract Expressionism. A painting obtained reality just by transmitting the artist’s own “kinetic and visual sense of the world,” Porter wrote. This was an indirect jab at his favorite nemesis, the critic Clement Greenberg, whose lockjawed aesthetic program presented Ab Ex as an expression of History itself, which marched in only one direction: from figuration and depth to abstraction and flatness. Greenberg represented the greatest sin for Porter—letting ideas overrule experience. Ideas made painters and critics impervious to seeing what was in front of them. Porter’s mission was to make people see again.

For whatever reason, Porter couldn’t see people. His portraits are almost comically bad. The painter Larry Rivers described Porter’s portrait of him as “flat and rather empty,” and that applies to pretty much all of them. (For the comic element, consider his painting of Frank O’Hara, who looks a bit like a salami sliding off a couch.) None of Porter’s talent for shadow, light, and air transfers to bodies and faces. With “The Screen Porch” (1964), a large group portrait that desperately wants to be a masterpiece—it has a number of auteur touches, like a cannister of turpentine in the bottom left which signals “the painter was here”—Porter’s family had the right idea, nicknaming it “The Four Ugly People.” The only portrait in the exhibition with a spark is “Jimmy and John” (1957-58), of the poets James Schuyler and John Ashbery. Their friendship isn’t visible, nor are their personalities, but the way their bodies are angled away from each other evokes two ships crossing in open water. Just that simple arrangement makes the distance between them ache.