During the ’50s, when the critics and pundits determined that realism was no longer a viable art form, and that the true art was that of the Abstract Expressionists, Fairfield Porter and a handful of artists working on both coasts maintained a quiet but insistent presence on behalf of American Realism. Throughout the ’60s, the heyday of Minimalism and Op Art, conventional realism continued to be viewed as an anachronism, a stodgy throwback to a less enlightened, less sophisticated world. In spite of his acquaintance with the succession of Post War hip art movements, Porter remained staunchly committed to his artistic principles. Porter’s place, then, is significant. For much of his lifetime, he won praise for his written and spoken editorials and contributions to the critical dialogues of the contemporary art world in such publications as ArtNews‚ The Nation‚ Art in America and Evergreen Review. Yet, all the while, he produced paintings through which he expressed and realized a unique, finely honed aesthetic vision that at the time was only quietly and dispassionately noted.

The Seavest Collection’s memorable Breakfast Still Life was painted by Porter in 1975, the year in which he died unexpectedly, in September, at age sixty-eight.Breakfast Still Life is emblematic of the serene confidence and maturity of an artist who has studied and mastered his craft both intellectually and artistically. The composition, a table set for breakfast, with views to the outdoors through a screened-in porch, clearly signals Porter’s debt to the paintings of Vuillard and other of the Impressionists and Post Impressionists. He was inspired by their ability to find in domestic interiors and still life an unending bounty of subject matter to be distilled and transformed with great artifice into stunning pictorial fictions.

Porter esteemed the Impressionists for their genius in the use of paint to describe light and in the sensual pleasure they obviously took in the paint medium itself - traits that clearly abound in Porter’s own work. In Manet, Porter found the power of unmodulated color to describe form. In Vuillard, whom he appreciated perhaps most of all, key lessons were to be discovered about tensions between figure and ground, and about the structural value of insistent horizontals and verticals. In the best of Vuillard’s work, surfaces virtually dissolve into luxurious, decorative patterns. As such Vuillard’s paintings represent the further breakdown of the Impressionists’ analytical dissection of visual phenomena into color and light. Porter imbibed this Vuillard lesson, for sure.

However, as much as he admired the work of the late 19th century Europeans, Porter’s palette and approach were quite distinct and American. As a critic of the reigning post war art movements, Porter recognized the innovations that each movement offered and extracted from them that which he deemed necessary for his own artistic development. Likewise, the contemporary adage ‘art for art’s sake’ seemed to provide for him the same safety net under which to formulate his own unique visual figural language. For Porter politics, social causes, and ideas/ideals were antithetical to the main function of art. “ArtÉ is materialistic. It Éimplies respect for things as they are.” In a letter to Claire Nicolas White he wrote, “What one pays attention to is what is real (I mean reality calls for one's attention) and reality is everything. It is not only the best part. It is not an essence. Everything includes the pigment as much as the canvas as much as the subject.” (Fairfield Porter, “Letters to Claire and Robert White,” Parenthèse, no. 4, [1975], 212.)

The quiet energy of Seavest’s Breakfast Still Lifeinvites the viewer into its intimate world. Pattern and color enliven the pictorial surface, all but replacing perspective in the definition of space. In a Vuillard- or Matisse-like maneuver, we are led from the breakfast room through the grid of windows (given form by the “white” of unpainted watercolor paper) to a screened-in porch, the awning of which is identified in purple shadow, and ultimately to the misty blue of the outdoors. Demonstrating technical skill equal to that of the early 20th century masters, this exquisite watercolor carries the stamp of a master painter. Managing the challenging medium of watercolor with the same skill as his oils, Porter was able to maintain the tonal harmony necessary to sustain the play of figure and ground, as well as the anonymity of detail so effortlessly evoked.

©by Virginia Anne Bonito, revised "Get Real" Porter essay, April 30, 2000.

For a more detailed printed view of the collection order the book:
	Get Real: Contemporary American Realism from the Seavest Collection Virginia Anne Bonito. Foreword by Michael Philip Mezzatesta, pp. 138, 68 colorplates, 2 b/w photographs Exhibition at DUMA April 4-July 6, 1997. Hard cover $40.00 Soft cover $25.00 To order contact: Duke University Museum of Art Click on Publications