Justin Spring, a novelist, journalist, and critic, is most recently the author of Wolf Kahn and The Essential Jackson Pollock. He has spent the past seven years as a regular contributor to Artforum magazine . This book accompanies an exhibition of Fairfield Porter' s painting at the Equitable Gallery, New York City. This absorbing biography of Fairfield Porter makes clear John Ashbery' s assessment of Porter as perhaps the major American artist of this century. Justin Spring tells of Porter' s troubled, bohemian life, his struggle to raise a family while dealing with a bisexual identity, his work as an artist producing realist works in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement, and his late triumph as a painter and critic.
Nothing is more problematic than an artist's biography.
Justin Spring certainly throws new light upon Fairfield Porter's canvases, and does so from many angles. As one who knew several of the dramatis personae but never the leading actor, I was instantly caught up in the intelligent and nostalgic flow of the narrative, and relived what I'd felt would never come again. Dealing with a man of enormous emotional complexity and contradiction, Spring offers the first major assessment of Porter's turbulent personal, political and creative life. Spring presents a well-documented and readable biography of one of the major American painters of the 20th century. . . . A Life in Art is the most comprehensive and most intimate biography of this important painter, perceptive critic, and sometime poet.