Fairfield Porter: What Everyone Knows at The Art Students League of New York was thrilling to see with veteran painter Rackstraw Downes. Porter wondrously transforms the everyday into a patchwork of fractured light and form\u2014his \u201cImpressionist shimmer.\u201d Seeing paintings with Downes is a rigorous exercise in looking: \u201cLook at that blue on the edge\u2014it doesn\u2019t even look like it belongs there,\u201d he marveled, referring to a muted cerulean passage describing a lone sliver of sky on the left margin in The Garden Road (1962). Indeed, the rest of the sky is depicted as ochre-warmed titanium-white dashes atop olive-drab passages that become a skein of branches. \u201cI have always had a feeling about shapes,\u201d Porter wrote, \u201cnot that they resembled other ones, but that they had character.\u201d<\/p>\n
In A Day Indoors (1962)\u2014curiously the only acrylic in the exhibition\u2014Downes declared, \u201cthat fire is fantastic,\u201d pointing to a hearth on the canvas\u2019s margin, paradoxically dashed off in watery washes. Porter\u2019s compositions tend to decenter the scene and disorient the viewer; the more one looks, the more it becomes apparent. Downes admiringly pointed to a rug painted as a striped lozenge-shape that could resemble an abstract painting made when he arrived at Yale University in 1961. There, his group of peers included William Bailey, Chuck Close, Janet Fish, Jane Freilicher, Al Held, Alex Katz, Robert and Sylvia Mangold, and Neil Welliver.<\/p>\n
As a self-described \u201ccard-carrying Modernist,\u201d Downes first saw Porter\u2019s work during this period in the exhibition \u201cContemporary Art from New York Galleries,\u201d the first of a series in the Yale University Museum. He strongly disliked the work in this show by Porter but then soon these paintings\u2014also discussed by other students\u2014changed the trajectory of his work. I had an uncanny feeling of the exhibition\u2019s temporality\u2014for me, this was art history; for Downes it was a recollection of moments in his life in art. Generations of artists see different things, and it was evident that Downes has been looking longer than I have been alive. Downes went on to know Porter and ultimately edit and write the introduction for Porter\u2019s collected writings Art in Its Own Terms, published in 1979\u2014coincidentally the year I was born.<\/p>\n
As we viewed The Screen Porch (1964)\u2014a monumental family portrait with James Schuyler, a poet-interloper\u2014Downes recalled speaking with Porter at his 1965 exhibition at Tibor de Nagy, then located at 149 East 72 Street. He still remembers climbing the townhouse staircase to the gallery. After Downes took a brief walk through the show, he was approached by Porter, pointing to The Screen Porch, \u201cWhat do you think of this one?\u201d Downes replied, \u201cIt\u2019s the most difficult painting in the show.\u201d Porter pressed on, \u201cDifficult to make or difficult to enjoy?\u201d This exchange exemplifies the intellectual rigor of their dialog, which was fierce but respectful.<\/p>\n
As writers, both Porter and Downes built vast discourses around their painting practices. In Porter\u2019s writings, he regarded reality as particular, actual, and specific; frequently, he expressed a suspicion of idealism and systems imposed before experience. A sort of perceptual empiricism, Porter wanted painting to remain answerable to what presents itself rather than to a priori theory of what painting should be. I see this thinking in what Downes emphasized in the gallery: the apparently arbitrary blue, the strange interval, the fire\u2014discoveries that arise from the sustained attention of careful looking. This kind of seeing seems to be aligned with what Porter remarks as \u201cthe real is what can be seen,\u201d not an idea but something \u201cspecific and total\u201d and \u201cmaterial and specific and actual\u201d\u2014arriving at what he calls \u201cillogical immediacy.\u201d Porter\u2019s perceptual empiricism thus carries a claim about reality itself: the real is material, particular, and actual rather than an idea imposed upon experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fairfield Porter: What Everyone Knows at The Art Students League of New York was thrilling to see with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347803,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-347802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347802","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347802\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}