Four Essays on Fairfield Porter

One of this year’s best essays is Dan Chiasson’s “Where the Meanings Are” (The New York Review of Books, August 20.2026). It’s a review of the exhibition “Fairfield Porter: What Everyone Knows” at the Art Students League, New York City. It’s not only a superb analysis of Porter’s painting, it’s a travel piece, too! Chiasson is excellent on Porter’s painting style. He says,

Porter’s brushstrokes seem at times still wet to the touch, trailing off like vapor before suddenly detonating a bluster of peach or indigo. Paint plays out luxuriously and abstractly within the idea of summer things like Bermuda shorts, clay courts, lawns, and tablecloths, as it does for other painters only in a stormy sea or roiling sky.

I’m interested in Porter. He first came to my attention many years ago when I read John Updike’s great “Violence at the Windows” (included in his 1989 Just Looking). It’s a review of the 1983 show “Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction” at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The title derives from Updike’s observation “Sunlight explodes with terrific violence at the windows of his hushed interiors.” Updike gave the show a mixed review. He says, “There are perhaps six superb paintings and two dozen more that well reward contemplation. The rest are tainted to a greater or lesser degree by a quality one might call amateurism.” Ouch! One of the paintings he liked is Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969). He wrote,

Interior with a Dress Pattern, the most closely worked painting in the show, describes a domestic interior so lovingly that the viewer feels invited to come in and take a chair; its range of reds and dark golds compares with the sumptuous calm of Matisse’s Red Studio and Piero della Francesca’s stately explorations of perspective.

A reproduction of Interior with a Dress Pattern illustrates Updike’s piece. I’d never seen it before. It struck me as wonderful. Still does. 

Chiasson doesn’t mention Interior with a Dress Pattern. He focuses on Porter’s “Schuyler” paintings, e.g., Jimmy and John (1957-58), A Day Indoors (1962), and The Screen Porch (1964). One of Chiasson’s best passages is his description of A Day Indoors:

A third view of Schuyler, A Day Indoors (1962), hangs beside the ugly people. Schuyler has again commandeered the best seat: on this cold summer day in Maine, he warms himself by the roaring hearth in “the big house” on Great Spruce Head Island. Three figures, Schuyler and the two girls, are smaller, and somewhat indistinct, and seem included partly for scale and contrast; the star of the painting is the room, with its poppy-red painted floor and deteriorating, high-kitsch New England decor, including a model sloop and, above the fire, a reproduction of one of the Elgin Marbles. The accent is on a colorful, braided oval rug, a standard L.L. Bean item, so familiar you can almost smell the must. The chairs and furniture in the room jut at sharp angles and form a visual chute that creates a measure of suspense about the closed door at its terminus. (Ominous music: Is Anne Porter about to enter?) The details in the painting seem to hang on the vertical axis, like buoys in a fishing net. But the area rug is perfectly flush with the frame in the lower-right corner, where a mapmaker would locate his key. This summer cottage staple, repeating the spectrum of colors in the overall composition, is a kind of palette: you could imagine Porter dipping a brush into one of those vivid stripes to touch up Schuyler’s khakis or pale red button-down. Or, with its suggestion of dynamic, spiraling depth, perhaps it’s a drain, threatening to suck this moody group back out to sea, like bilge.

I love that “The accent is on a colorful, braided oval rug, a standard L.L. Bean item, so familiar you can almost smell the must.”

The New Yorker’s Zachary Fine also reviewed the Art Students League’s exhibition. At first, Fine appears not to be a Porter fan. He says in his opening paragraph, “I think if you saw a lone painting of his in a junk shop, unsigned and unframed, you’d find it perfectly pleasing and mediocre.” But it turns out he likes the show. He writes,

Porter studied at the League under Thomas Hart Benton—one of his classmates was a fellow named Jackson Pollock—and the experience of seeing his work here, as students hustle by with their backpacks and the perfume of turpentine wafts through the air, feels organic and just right. The gallery is evenly and fluorescently lit, and all thirty-five or so of Porter’s featured paintings are in a single room, concentrating his palette of lime greens and creamy yellows and oxblood reds into one bright, soul-cleansing burst.

Fine says, “Let the paintings breathe for a while, let them interact with one another and with your thoughts, and they’ll meld together with salt breeze and summer light.”

Reading these delightful pieces, I recalled another excellent essay on Porter – Peter Schjeldahl’s “Stern Beauty” (The New Yorker, April 17, 2000; included in his 2008 collection Let’s See). It contains this pithy observation: “For Porter, the ordinary was an urgent ideal.” As usual, Schjeldahl nailed it.

Chiasson’s piece ends beautifully with an account of his visit to Porter’s summer home on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine. This place figures centrally in many of Porter’s best paintings. Chiasson writes,

Approaching “the big house,” a child bounded out to greet us, reporting with some satisfaction that there were no waffles left. The interior depicted in A Day Indoors remains unchanged from Porter’s depiction of it, down to the poppy-colored floors. (Floors in several bathrooms in houses on the island are done in the same color: there was “surplus paint,” David conjectured.) Upstairs, “Jimmy’s room” is just as it was the day Schuyler wrote “Buried at Springs,” his elegy for Frank O’Hara, while fending off a hornet. The poem is partly about writing O’Hara’s tribute at the desk where O’Hara himself had sat eleven years before, and “saw and heard it all.” It’s all still there, the desk, the bed, the spruces and sound of lapping water, as both poets saw and heard it; before we left, I sat down in Schuyler’s rocking chair, still positioned closest to the hearth.

I love it when a critic steps away from his desk and goes out into the world, seeking personal experience of the subject he’s writing about. Chiasson’s visit to Porter’s house on Great Spruce Head Island provides an inspired conclusion to a splendid review. I enjoyed it immensely.  

Postscript: The above illustration is Fairfield Porter's Interior with a Dress Pattern (1969).