October Interior/Fairfield Porter

October Interior by Fairfield Porter, courtesy of the Crystal Bridges Art Museum

OCTOBER INTERIOR/Fairfield Porter

“…aesthetics is what connects one to matter of fact. It is anti-ideal, it is materialistic. It implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.”

The quote is from Fairfield Porter. I like the quote because it explains the functionality of realism without demanding any thing extra. Realism can be explained by that overly used saying: It is what it is.
Porter was a diehard realist at a time when the art world was deeply abstract. He lived on Long Island in the middle part of the twentieth century and was friendly with the abstract artists who were turning the art world upside down. Still, he preferred to create on terms that were personal to him and left it at that. Porter is one of the important realists of the past century but as the modernists defined the rules of art at that time, he is not as well-known as he should be.
Porter was from a wealthy Chicago family. It was the family’s money that sent him to the East Coast to attend Harvard and that is where he settled to paint. The family money also kept him going through the many years that he painted almost reclusively on the island. Many of his works are personally inspired by the area around him. There are landscape paintings; some of them using his home or his car as a prop. There are portraits of various family members and friends posing casually in the Porter home. And there are paintings of the interiors of his home, cozy and personal.
As well off and connected as he was, he was still just about as independent and ornery as any cowboy. It was his argumentative side that landed him a job at Art News and it wasn’t long before he started to exhibit in New York City.
Of the paintings I’ve seen by him, October Interior strikes me the most. It is one of the most sun-drenched paintings I’ve seen. Sunlight spills through the large sunroom windows, creating three columns of Naples yellow and light green that dominate the painting. The pastels of the sunroom shine in the sunlight and it is further enhanced by the beautiful fall day that also displays the joyful sunlit yellows of the painting. It looks as if the painting has exploded with Naples Yellow as it is also seen in the chairs, on the lawn and in the trees outside.
What also caught my eye is the way that the dark browns are balanced to keep them from dominating the painting. The tall tree trunks are balanced by the dark rectangle on the left wall and the large dark brown chair found on the lower right hand side. The chair could easily be a distraction but it is surrounded by other items that seem to lessen its distractive power. Fairfield’s wife reclines in dark greens and blues and a rocking horse is accented in red. The red then appears in the plants on the table, diffusing the red.
This generous use of Naples Yellow is a visual theme in several of his paintings. It is a joyful color that is neither intense nor dominating. Porter liked to paint in the fall, a time when the leaves drop from the trees and allow the surrounding landscape to fill with light.
In the last half of his life, he and his wife lived in Southampton, on Long Island. He died there and his wife donated Fairfield’s unsold work to the Parrish Art Museum, also located in Southampton.

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Cape Cods At The End Of Fall, an oil painting