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A major survey of the work of this important contemporary artist.
Fairfield Porter (1907 -1975) was an American realist painter whose works were flooded with a light that seems more than the sun can create. "When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful." This very interesting though rather small catalogue from the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton exhibition in the Spring of 2010 titled FAIRFIELD PORTER: RAW share with the public many of the Museum's major archive of Porter's works. The fascinating part of the exhibition and the book is the sharing of sketches, many on masonite, many unframed, and many of ideas that never found their way to a completed canvas. Fairfield Porter was an art critic as well as a painter and so it is most appropriate that this catalogue includes an essay by another artist/critic; Frank O'Hara's 'Porter Paints a Picture' is as informative as it is alliterative. Porter was one of the group of artists who continued to paint the figure and the landscape when most American artists were committed to Abstract Expressionism. If his works seem rather flat now that apparent problem is more than overcome by his amazing use of light. Even in his interior paintings and sketches there is a quality of light that is almost eerie were it no defining such mundane ideas as those Porter chose to paint. The catalogue is well produced and is made more important by the learned essay by Klaus Ottmann - 'An Unfinished Quality: Fairfield Porter's Creative Process'. Would that there were more museums willing to publish the unfinished works of major artists that give us an opportunity to understand the choices and rejections of thoughts from a painter's mind. Grady Harp
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Overview
A major survey of the work of this important contemporary artist.