Looking back on American art of the 19th and early 20th century,painter and critic Fairfield Porter detected a puritanical tendencythat depressed him. "What I hate," he wrote to a friend in 1972, "isthe . . . idea that light is of no account, that pleasure condemnsyou to hell, that life is empty of daily significance."
His own work seems a kind of corrective to that attitude, forPorter delighted in all the details of quotidian existence: in theagreeable clutter of the breakfast table after a meal, the gloriousyellow of forsythia blossoms in spring, the gentle fall of morninglight through a half-shaded bedroom window.
He made these small but not unimportant pleasures the subject ofhis art, never compelled to deny them for the sake of more grandiosethemes. He drew from the world around him, working mostly at hishome in Long Island or in the summer house his father had built nearthe sea in Great Spruce Head, Maine. Still life and landscape, cozyinteriors, affectionate portraits of family and friends occupiedPorter for his entire 40-year career as a painter, until his death in1975, at age 68.
A group of these quietly beautiful pictures forms the inauguralexhibition at the CompassRose Gallery, 325 W. Huron, through April26.
Interspersed with texts excerpted from Porter's writing forArtnews, The Nation and Art in America, the paintings speak ofdomestic comforts and nature's charms, but also of the gorgeousappeal of the medium itself - smooth and glossy, sometimes brushy andthick, always a palpable, sensuous presence. Porter managed tostrike a magnificent balance, putting paint in the service ofobservation and making it suggest a mood, all the while celebratingits independence as a viscous, physical substance.
His was, above all, a painterly kind of realism, as attentive tothe demands of his aesthetic as to the look of the real world thatinspired him.
Like Edward Hopper, that other quintessentially American realistartist, Porter was a "poet of facts"; he painted what he saw withart and feeling. Hopper, indeed, could have been describing Porter'sambitions as well as his own when he declared that what he wanted topaint was sunlight on the side of a house. But there is none ofHopper's melancholy in Porter, no hint of loneliness or psychologicalalienation. A sense of familial warmth inhabits all Porter'spictures, even when no figures appear.
Perhaps his color schemes are a factor here - soft pinks,lavender, creamy beige, egg-yolk yellow - but there's also awelcoming, lived-in character to the rooms he knew and loved so well.He painted the yellow living room of his summer house eight times(two versions are included in this show), with ship models proudlydisplayed, books cluttering the table, a bedspread drying on thefurniture.
He adored the Intimists, especially Edouard Vuillard, who sharedhis predilection for bourgeois interiors, homey scenes adapted to therequirements of their decorative, decidedly French sensibility. Andlike them, Porter often flirted with abstraction while remainingfirmly committed to the task of depicting his immediate surroundings.Talented, wealthy, sensitive and erudite, he seems to have enjoyed anenviable situation - one in which his life and art could exist onblissfully intimate terms.
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