Fairfield Porter

(1907-1975)

Roses 17 5/8 x 14 1/8 in. (44.8 x 35.9 cm.)

Footnotes

Provenance
Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York.
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York.
Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago.
Private collection, acquired from the above.
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York.
Gene Saks (1921-2015) and Keren (née Ettlinger) Saks (b. 1947), New York.
Schutz and Company Fine Art, New York.
Private collection, New York, acquired from the above.
Leslie Feely Fine Art, New York, by 2002.
Private collection, Belmont, Massachusetts, acquired from the above, December 16, 2002.
Gifted from the above to the present owners, 2003-04.

Exhibited
Valparaiso, Indiana, Moellering Library, Valparaiso University, Recent Realism - Early to Current Modern, February 7-28, 1973, n.p., no. 25.
New York, Leslie Feely Fine Art, Leslie Feely: Private Eye, October 18-November 13, 2007, n.p., no. 28, illustrated.

Literature
J. Ludman, Fairfield Porter: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Paintings, Watercolors, and Pastels, New York, 2001, pp. 233-34, no. L594, illustrated.
J. Wilmerding, K. Wilkin, J.D. McClatchy, Fairfield Porter, New York, 2016, pp. 17, 164-65, pl. 64, illustrated, also back dust jacket cover illustration.

Fairfield Porter's Roses is one of the artist's most accomplished still life paintings, executed with an authentically spontaneous sensibility that characterizes Porter's best works from the later part of his artistic career. In Roses, Porter brilliantly exhibits his appreciation for the relaxed, sophisticated qualities of still life painting. The present work was executed within the last decade of his life before his unexpected death, a period when Porter started to work at the height of his artistic abilities with a discernible individual aesthetic that beautifully explored an interplay of abstraction and representation. Through his mastered painterly execution of color, light, and form applied to the canvas with great control of the medium, Porter conveys the vitality and essence of the still life and delivers a unique perspective toward ordinary objects. The painted surface offers a tactile expression of the composition, from the articulated impasto of the petals of the flowers to the smooth brushstrokes of the vase that suggest its polished and transparent qualities. Porter's Roses is a masterful celebration of the extraordinary beauty and naturalistic splendor of still life painting, as much as it is of the tranquil respite the artist found in his ordinary observations of his lived experiences.

In February of 1967, the same year the present work was painted, Porter gave a lecture titled "Art and Knowledge" and participated in the roundtable discussion "The Arts Today: A Symptom of a Sick Society?" at the Creative Arts Festival at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. It was there that Porter contributed an idea that he was preoccupied with during the final years of his career that would impact his approach to the canvas and his subjects. He was "Against the Platonic notion that what is real is an idea...art is not ideal, it's material and specific and actual. It's not an idea." (as quoted in J. Spring, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art, New Haven, Connecticut, 2000, p. 286) Inspired by the poetry of Stéphane (Étienne) Mallarmé (1842-1898) and William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Porter believed in the material, specific, and actual as the ultimate reality and the strict and careful scientific examination of the natural world that his father, James Foster Porter (1871-1939) valued greatly. James Schuyler (1923-1991), poet, writer, and friend of the Porter family, rearticulated Porter's painting theories shortly after his time at Kent State in an article he wrote for Art News in May 1967, stating "What we are given [in Porter's work] is an aspect of everyday as the ultimate, the most varied and desirable knowledge. What these paintings celebrate is never treated as an archetype: they are concentrated instances. They are not a substitute for religion, they are an attitude toward life...What we are given [in Porter's paintings] is an aspect of everyday life." (J. Schuyler, "An Aspect of Fairfield Porter's Paintings," Art News, May 1967, p. 18) It was this attitude that is beautifully put on display in his late paintings of the 1960s, including Roses.

That summer shortly after Schuyler's article was published, Porter along with his wife Anne Elizabeth (neé) Channing (1911-2011) and their daughters, Katie and Liz, boarded the Michelangelo on June 5th to begin an extensive and ambitious trip through Europe. There stops included Rome, Orvieto, Florence, and Venice in Italy, Paris, France, and London, England to later depart from Southampton, England on the vessel France on August 12th. When they returned to Southampton, New York, Porter was eager to spend time painting again and returned with a newfound appreciation for his home and the light in Southampton and New York. With his theories articulated earlier in the year likely still fresh in his mind and inspired by his newfound appreciation for his home after being away for almost 2 months, Porter completed several interiors and still lifes in his Southampton studio, likely including the present work.

In Roses, painted with dynamic brushstrokes and a vivid color palette, Porter depicts a simplistically arranged floral arrangement that includes pink and yellow roses in a clear glass vase that rests on a wooden table all amidst a gray backdrop. As Porter demonstrates in Roses like in many of his later works, each element of the scene, such as the varying shades of pink rose petals to the solid tones of the table and backdrop, are painted in a manner that resembles the techniques of the color field painters. Porter focuses on applying plains of pure abstracted color of varying shape and size with soft tonal shifts to describe the subject. Furthermore, he flattens the perspective of the table and the backdrop, drawing focus on the still life. The image, though beautiful and seemingly celebrating the comfortable, middle-class world lived in, is not intended to be ideal, but rather material and a direct transcription from life in Porter's unique style. In Roses, Porter masterfully presents his viewing audience with an uncomplicated image that purely portrays his personal attitudes toward his authentically lived experiences with his everyday surroundings.

Boldly painted, Roses conveys a strong sense of place and beautifully demonstrates Porter's mature handling of a representational subject through his hallmark lens of abstraction. His techniques resulted in works that were as individual as the moments in his life that he sought to portray and reflected his belief that an artist should be open to experience while creating art. The art historian William C. Agee wrote of Porter's approach and method that he "Sought an unforced naturalness. The idea was to render the canvas fluently and of a piece, by means of an abstract, interlocking surface; in this way, the sum of his painterly decisions determined the composition. Here was how Porter discovered the life and vitality inherent in what he saw, capturing his essential experience of the world around him." (Fairfield Porter: An American Painter, exhibition catalogue, Southampton, New York, 1993, p. 11) Porter's ability to genuinely transcribe his subjects with an unforced naturalness culminates in Roses like in few other of his works and the relationships between interlocking elements of the scene through palpable areas of paint and light remain captivating and fresh.