Yankee Against the Grain

By ROBERT HUGHES

* A reticent Yankee patrician, the Harvard-educated offspring of a family that once owned much of the farmland on which the Chicago Loop now stands, Fairfield Porter was always a bit of an anomaly in the New York art world. He doesn't fit the standard profile of postwar American painting. People thought -- and to a degree, some now think -- that his work was "soft": civil and private, figurative in a time of heroic abstraction, obsessed with the invocation of natural beauty. But scratch its agreeable surface, and there is flint below, and an unquenchable heat of pictorial intelligence. Or so one realizes, looking at the retrospective of Porter's work from the 1940s to his death in 1975, now at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York. Curated by the art historian William Agee, it is an excellent introduction to a still much underrated artist.

Porter was largely self-taught. From the time he found his feet as an artist -- around the mid-1950s -- he stayed away from Manhattan, preferring to paint in Southampton and on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine, which his family owned. This didn't put him out of contact with "the scene." Porter was an exceptionally gifted critic who, in Art News and the Nation, produced some of the most lucid and cant-free essays on modern art in general, and Willem de Kooning's work in particular, ever penned by an American. But he knew his own mind as a painter and needed to be in constant touch with his motifs -- American light, and the stillness of coastal field and sea.

Porter rejected the avant-gardist piety that the empirically painted figure or landscape was dead. It simply didn't accord with his convictions about how art relates to experience and conveys its "density," a favorite word. Nowhere does his work show a sign of the metaphysical yearnings of the New York school, still less its primitivism. Porter's was very much a modernist vision, but classically so; its main source was Paris, and its exemplars were the great Intimists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. From them, as Agee notes in his catalog essay, Porter learned to "paint what you know, what is given to you, what is in front of you, and let the painting speak for itself."

Aspects of the work of older American artists recur in Porter's work: Marsden Hartley's love of bony mass, Edward Hopper's treatment of light. But there were very great differences. Porter was a more nuanced and daring colorist than Hartley; his world is more lyric than Hopper's, and on the whole untouched by melancholy. It is also more generalized in treatment. In a large painting like Island Farmhouse, 1969, the white weatherboard asserts itself in a blast of light like a Doric temple; the lines of shadow are a burning visionary yellow; everything, from the angular dog to the ragged trees, is seen in sharp patches, and yet one's eye feels bathed in atmosphere, all the way out to the blue island on the remote horizon. As in all Porter's best paintings, the structure is locked together by affinities of shape, natural rhymes of form and color. You can't paint like this without deep cultivation as well as talent.

Porter's feeling for the old masters, and his oblique way of quoting them -- testing himself against them -- is quite explicit in a painting like The Mirror, 1966. It is his homage to Velazquez's Las Meninas. A young girl sits with her back to a large mirror, propped up behind her in the studio. The mirror reflects her back and, beyond that, the painter, whose posture recalls the image of the distant chamberlain at the end of Velazquez's long chamber. And yet, once you have figured out its setup, seen that the window with its blurred blaze of wintry light is actually a reflection in the mirror, the sense of spatial enigma drops away. You are left with a plain rendition in rather liquid paint of a girl in a red cardigan and an artist in a mustard- colored shirt. The Velazquez references sink back, as they are meant to do, into the matrix of observed reality.

Can Porter be called a master of figure painting? In truth, no; there was always something awkward about his handling of the human body, a Yankee stiffness that prevented him from emulating the sensuous fluency of Bonnard. The figures in his paintings are always in the right place, formally speaking. He was a wonderful arranger, with a stringent and finely honed eye for the needs and eccentricities of pictorial composition. But at the same time, his paintings don't suggest much feel for the movement and solidity of the body. His work prefers sociability to sensuality -- a trait shared by his friend Alex Katz. Porter painted few nudes; there are none in this show.

Where he really connected was in landscape. It's as though the reticence he brought to the scrutiny of other people simply melted away. This doesn't mean that his landscapes are more "expressive," only that they radiate a greater sense of freedom. "The presence in a painting," he once wrote, "is like the presence a child feels and recognizes in things and the way they relate, like a doorknob, the slant of a roof . . . Art does not succeed by compelling you to like it, but by making you feel this presence in it. . . ((which)) can be impersonal." There is enough of this "presence" in Porter's work to place it among the finest landscape painting ever done by an American.