Fairfield Porter

Fairfield Porter was at the forefront of post-war representational painters who struggled for recognition during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Although a realist in subject matter, Porter not only admired and championed the abstract work of his friend Willem de Kooning, but also himself gravitated to the inherent abstraction found in nature. He explored the subjective experience of landscape, figurative, and still life subjects in Southampton and Spruce Head Island, Maine. His flattened, unmodeled, soft-edged forms portrayed three-dimensional space with a gestural, lush brush stroke and patterned surface arrangement of forms. Porter drew inspiration from his domestic life, once noting to a student: “I think…that a strong religious feeling requires a strong sense of matter-of-fact.”