Volume 47, Number 10 · June 15, 2000
Artist with a Calling
By Sanford Schwartz
Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art
by Justin Spring
Yale University Press, 384 pp., #35.00
Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art
an exhibition at the AXA Gallery, New York, March 23-May 27, 2000
OTHER BOOKS DRAWN ON IN THIS ESSAY:
Selections from the Fairfield Porter Papers Institution, New York, March 16-July 10, 2000
an exhibition at the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian
Art in Its Own Terms: Selected Criticism, 1935-1975 (1983)
by Fairfield Porter, edited and with an introduction by Rackstraw Downes
Zoland Books, 288 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Fairfield Porter: An American Classic (1992)
by John T. Spike
Abrams, 320 pp., $75
Fairfield Porter: The Collected Poems, with Selected Drawings (1985)
edited by John Yau, by with David Kermani, with an introduction by John Ashbery
Tibor de Nagy Editions/The Promise of Learnings, Inc., 90 pp., $20.00 (paper)
Thomas Eakins (1959)
by Fairfield Porter
Braziller, 127 pp., (out of print)
Fairfield Porter was one of the most intensely ethical painters in the annals of American art, so he might wonder about the claims that have been made for him in the years since his death. Justin Spring's biography is now the second major study of the painter that fudges the significance of a figure whose standing was ambiguous already for most of his career. Spring begins and ends his account by quoting John Ashbery's estimation that Porter is 'perhaps the major American artist of this century.' John T. Spike, in turn, in his profusely illustrated 1992 account of Porter's art and life, used as his shield, as it were, Hilton Kramer's belief that Porter is 'an American classic.' Both of Porter's biographers imply that they understand that the high claims of Ashbery and Kramer (and a few others) aren't universally held; but neither stops to examine, really, what is now a growing chasm between this artist's admirers and those for whom he's barely on the chart. Neither acknowledges that Porter, who was also a serious and shrewd critic, came far closer to the reality of the situation when he wrote in his last years, 'I think sometimes that as far as museums and patrons are concerned that I may be 'finished,' that is, that it has been decided that my work is not really any good.'
Review, 4432 words
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