The painter Fairfield Porter, coming into glory now a quarter century after his death, embraced a variety of contradictions.
He was a figurative painter in an age of abstraction-he was the forward edge, that is, of a realist tradition that, but for him, had died. A New England patrician blessed with Chicago real-estate money, he was the father of five, best known for sunny scenes of his family at leisure; he was also a bisexual adulterer spooked all his life by his own cold childhood.
In his lifetime he got more recognition from writers than from museum buyers and gallery dealers. He was a poet and a critic, too, who said he was prouder of the reviews he'd written than of the paintings he'd painted.
But it's Fairfield Porter's paintings that have come to the fore again in a new biography and an overdue show in New York: he made spacious, intimate, open images that call out with intimacy and intelligence.
Fairfield Porter's life in art in this hour of The Connection. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
