“Fairfield Porter: An American Painter” at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York.
June 27–September 12, 1993
The exhibition that William C. Agee has devoted to the work of Fairfield Porter (1907–75) is an event of considerable importance. Although, like many American painters of his generation, Porter did not hit his stride as an artist until he was in his forties, he soon developed into one of the best painters of his period. It wasn’t until the last years of his life, however, that the public began to catch up with his achievement, and it is still too little known. While in the 1950s and Sixties he enjoyed the esteem of a small circle of painters and poets—among them, Willem de Kooning, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery—and indeed exerted some influence on a younger generation of representational painters, Porter had more of a following as a critic for Art News and The Nation and as the author of a monograph on Thomas Eakins (1959) than he did as an artist. It was only in the Seventies that his work began to enter the museums, and not until 1983, eight years after his death, was there a major museum survey of his oeuvre. That was the exhibition organized by Kenworth Moffett at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston under the title “Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction.”
The very title of that 1983 retrospective was an acknowledgment of the problem that had impeded
