Fairfield Porter papers
name: label: Creator
content: Porter, Fairfield
label: Names
content: Hirschl & Adler Galleries
label: Names
content: Tibor de Nagy Gallery
label: Names
content: Brainard, Joe, 1942-
label: Names
content: Burkhardt, Rudy
label: Names
content: Button, John, 1929-1982
label: Names
content: Day, Lucien B., 1916-
label: Names
content: Downes, Rackstraw
label: Names
content: Elmslie, Kenward
label: Names
content: Evergood, Philip, 1901-1973
label: Names
content: Frielicher, Jane
label: Names
content: Giardelli, Arthur
label: Names
content: Guest, Barbara
label: Names
content: Hartl, Léon, 1889-
label: Names
content: Hess, Thomas B.
label: Names
content: Katz, Alex, 1927-
label: Names
content: Koch, Kenneth, 1925-
label: Names
content: Laning, Edward, 1906-1981
label: Names
content: Lichtenstein, Roy, 1923-1997
label: Names
content: Morse, Carl
label: Names
content: Myers, John Bernard
label: Names
content: O'Hara, Frank, 1926-1966
label: Names
content: Padgett, Ron
label: Names
content: Porter, Ruth W., 1875-1942
label: Names
content: Rivers, Larry, 1925-
label: Names
content: Schloss, Edith, 1919-
label: Names
content: Schuyler, James
label: Names
content: Shapiro, David, 1947-
label: Names
content: Stankiewicz, Richard, 1922-
label: Names
content: Vasilieff, Nicholas
topic: label: Occupation
content: Art critics -- New York (State) -- Southampton
label: Topic
content: Works of art
label: Topic
content: Painters -- New York (State) -- Southampton
label: Topic
content: Painting, Modern -- 20th century
label: Topic
content: Poets
label: Topic
content: Lithographers -- New York (State)
acqinfo: label: Provenance
content: The papers of Fairfield Porter were given to the Archives of American Art by the artist's wife, Anne Porter, in five separate accessions between 1977 and 1997.
creator: label: Creator
content: Porter, Fairfield
setName: label: See more items in
content: Fairfield Porter papers
abstract: label: Summary
content: The papers of New York-based painter, lithographer, art critic, and poet Fairfield Porter measure 9.3 linear feet and date from 1888 to 2001, with the bulk of material dating from 1924 to 1975. Papers document Porter's life and career through correspondence, writings, business records, printed materials, photographs, and artwork.
bioghist: label: Biographical Note
content: Fairfield Porter was born near Chicago in 1907, the fourth of five children of James and Ruth Furness Porter. His father was an architect, his mother a poet from a literary family, and Porter grew up in an environment where art and literature were highly valued. His father designed the family homes in Winnetka, Illinois and on Great Spruce Head Island, an island in Maine that he purchased for the family in 1912. Fairfield Porter spent summers there from the age of six, and views of the island, its structures, and neighboring towns were the subjects of many paintings.

Porter attended Harvard from 1924 to 1928, studying fine art with Arthur Pope and philosophy with Alfred North Whitehead. After graduating from Harvard, Porter moved to New York City and took studio classes at the Art Students League from 1928 until 1930, studying with Boardman Robinson and Thomas Hart Benton, and immersing himself in the art and radical politics of Greenwich Village. In the 1940s, he studied at Parson's School of Design with art restorer Jacques Maroger, adopting the Maroger recipe for an oil medium in his own painting.

To further his education as an artist, Porter traveled to Europe in 1931, where he spent time with expatriate art theorist Bernard Berenson and his circle. When he returned to New York, he allied himself with progressive, socialist organizations, and like many of his contemporaries, worked at creating socially relevant art. He did artwork for the John Reed Club, a communist group; taught drawing classes for Rebel Arts, a socialist arts organization; wrote for their magazine, Arise!; and created a mural for the Queens branch of the Socialist Party. Living in the Chicago area for several years in the 1930s, he illustrated chapbooks for the socialist poet John Wheelwright's Poems for a Dime and Poems for Two Bits series. Porter's financial contributions to the radical Chicago publication Living Marxism kept it afloat for several years. 

In 1932, Porter married Anne Channing, a poet from Boston, and they settled in New York. The Porters had five children, and their first son, born in 1934, suffered from a severe form of autism. In the next decade, they had two more sons, and spent three years in Porter's hometown of Winnetka, where he had his first solo exhibition of paintings. When they returned to New York in 1939, the Porters became friends with Edwin Denby, Rudy Burkhardt, and Elaine and Willem de Kooning. Porter became an earnest admirer of Willem de Kooning's artwork and was among the first to review and purchase it. 

In 1949, the Porters moved to the small, seaside town of Southampton, New York. Their two daughters were born in 1950 and 1956. Like the family home on Great Spruce Head Island, Southampton became the setting of many of Porter's paintings. In fact, almost all of his mature paintings depict family homes, surrounding landscapes, family members, and friends. Porter was an individualistic painter who embraced figurative art in the late 1940s and 1950s, when abstract expressionism was the prevailing aesthetic trend. Porter once made a comment that his commitment to figurative painting was made just to spite art critic Clement Greenberg, a respected critic and ideologue who had championed abstract expressionism and denigrated realism as passé. 

Porter established his reputation as a painter and as a writer in the 1950s. John Bernard Myers of the vanguard Tibor de Nagy gallery gave Porter his first New York exhibition in 1951 and represented him for the next twenty years. That same year Tom Hess, editor of ArtNews, hired Porter to write art features and reviews. Porter went on to contribute to ArtNews until 1967 and also became art editor for The Nation beginning in 1959, the same year his article on Willem de Kooning won the Longview Foundation Award in art criticism. As a critic, Porter visited countless galleries and studios, and he gained a reputation for writing about art with the understanding and vested interest of an artist, and with the same independence from fashionable ideas that he demonstrated in his artwork. 

The 1950s and 1960s were prolific years for Porter's writing and art, and saw the development of his critical ideas and the maturation of his painting. Porter enjoyed an elder status among a circle of younger artists such as Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, and Alex Katz, and their many poet friends, now known as the New York School of Poetry: Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and others. Porter himself wrote poetry and was published in the 1950s, sometimes alongside poems by his wife, who had been publishing poetry since the 1930s (twice in the vanguard Chicago journal, Poetry). The Porters' correspondence is laced with poems they and their friends sent back and forth, often about and dedicated to each other.

Besides his annual exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy and later Hirschl and Adler Galleries, Porter exhibited regularly at the Whitney, and had one-man exhibitions at many museums including the Rhode Island School of Design (1959), The University of Alabama (1963), Cleveland Museum of Art (his first retrospective, 1966), Trinity College (1967), the Parrish Art Museum (1971), the Maryland Institute of Art (1973), and the 1968 Venice Biennale. He also had residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1964) and Amherst College (1969). Porter died in 1975 at age 68. A full-scale retrospective of his artwork was held at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Boston in 1983, and a study center and permanent home for his artwork was established at the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton through a donation made by Anne Porter. A posthumous collection of his poems was published by Tibor de Nagy Editions in 1985, and a catalogue raisonnée, edited by Joan Ludman, was published in 2001.

This biography relies heavily on information found in Justin Spring's biography of Porter, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art (Yale University Press, 2000).
physdesc: label: Extent
content: 9.3 Linear Feet
unitdate: label: Date
content: 1888-2001
label: Date
content: bulk 1924-1975
dataSource: label: Archival Repository
content: Archives of American Art
identifier: label: Identifier
content: AAA.portfair
objectType: label: Type
content: Collection descriptions
label: Type
content: Archival materials
label: Type
content: Travel diaries
label: Type
content: Sketches
label: Type
content: Sketchbooks
label: Type
content: Photographs
arrangement: label: Arrangement
content: The collection is arranged into the following nine series. See the series descriptions below for more information about the content of each series.

Series 1: Biographical Materials, 1916-1975 (Box 1 and 11; 0.2 linear feet)

Series 2: Correspondence, 1918-1996 (Boxes 1-2; 1.2 linear feet)

Series 3: Writings by Fairfield Porter, 1924-1975 (Box 2; 0.6)

Series 4: Writings by Others, 1888-1992 (Boxes 2-3; 0.7 linear feet)

Series 5: Personal Business Records, 1944-1996 (Boxes 3-4; 1 linear foot)

Series 6: Anne Porter's Posthumous Projects, 1980-1988 (Box 4; 0.2 linear feet)

Series 7: Printed Materials, 1934-2001 (Boxes 4-6 and 11; 1.5 linear feet)

Series 8: Photographs, circa 1880-1990 (Boxes 6 and 11; 0.6 linear feet)

Series 9: Artwork, 1918-1975 (Boxes 7-10 and 12-17; 2.2 linear feet)
processinfo: label: Processing Information
content: These papers were initially processed for microfilming upon their accession to the Archives on reels 1311-1314 and 2675-2676. The collection was fully re-processed, arranged, and described by Megan McShea in 2006, and the bulk of it was scanned, with funding provided by the Terra Foundation for American Art Digitization Project.
altformavail: label: Alternative Forms Available
content: The papers of Fairfield Porter in the Archives of American Art were digitized in 2006, and total 9600 images.
genre_format: label: Genre/Form
content: Travel diaries
label: Genre/Form
content: Sketches
label: Genre/Form
content: Sketchbooks
label: Genre/Form
content: Photographs
originalsloc: label: Location of Originals
content: Before donating the papers to the Archives, Anne Porter returned letters from Frank O'Hara to Fairfield Porter to the O'Hara estate. Letters from John Ashbery to Fairfield Porter were returned to Ashbery, and photocopies have been placed in the collection.
scopecontent: label: Scope and Content Note
content: The papers of New York-based painter, lithographer, art critic, and poet Fairfield Porter measure 9.3 linear feet and date from 1888 to 2001, with the bulk of material dating from 1924 to 1975. The collection includes a biographical chronology; certificates, awards, and diplomas; letters to Fairfield and Anne Porter; scattered outgoing correspondence; and reviews, essays, notes, poems, and translations written by Porter and others. Among the writings are poetry manuscripts written by several New York School Poets including Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch. Also found are gallery records, inventories and appraisals, financial records, exhibition catalogs, clippings, posters, and records of Anne Porter's efforts to place his collection and document and publish his work after his death. Photographs of Porter, his homes, and his family are also present, as well as sketchbooks, loose sketches, and drawings spanning his entire career. 

Significant correspondence is present from the Porters' many poet friends, including Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Ron Padgett, Kenward Elmslie, Barbara Guest, Carl Morse, David Shapiro, and others. Among the letters are poetry manuscripts by Koch, Morse, Schuyler, Padgett, and Shapiro. Some letters are actually written in verse, especially those from Kenneth Koch.

Artists with letters in the collection include Joe Brainard, Rudy Burkhardt, John Button, Lucien Day, Rackstraw Downes, Philip Evergood, Jane Frielicher, Arthur Giardelli, Leon Hartl, Alex Katz, Edward Laning, Roy Lichtenstein, Larry Rivers, Richard Stankiewicz, Nicolas Vasilieff, among others. Other art world figures represented include John Bernard Myers, curator at the Tibor de Nagy gallery (New York), and Tom Hess, editor of ArtNews. Artwork found within the correspondence includes an illustrated letter from Ron Padgett and an original print on a holiday card by Edith Schloss.
relatedmaterial: label: Related Material
content: The Archives of American Art holds an oral history of Fairfield Porter conducted by Paul Cummings in 1968.