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QR Artist Interview Series: Fairfield Porter

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As part of our recurring artist interview series, we’re featuring some of the most memorable quotations from an actual interview with the twentieth-century artist Fairfield Porter. In a 1968 interview conducted by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Porter discussed some of the most formative experiences of his youth and his career. We hope that the following quotes from the interview provide a deeper understanding of this important artist’s early influences and first significant inspirations. 

Porter

 

First book: I read H.G. Wells science fiction. That’s what I remember. I remember mother used to read a great deal to us, Dickens. What I read to myself was H.G. Wells, The First Man in the Moon and everything that I could get by him.

First subject: I remember once in art class in grammar school. Everybody was supposed to bring a flower to school and paint it, and I didn’t bring anything. So they gave me a piece of timothy grass. I had a brush that was crooked; it was bent. And the teacher liked my rendering of timothy grass better than anybody else’s thing. She held it up before the class and said: Look what he did, and with that terrible brush.

First museum: Another reason I paint the way I do is that in 1938 we were living in Chicago; and in the Art Institute of Chicago here was an exhibition of Vuillard and Bonnard, both of them. I had never seen so many Vuillards before, or maybe so many Bonnards before. And I looked at the Vuillards and thought [that] maybe it was just a sort of revelation of the obvious and why does one think of doing anything else when it’s so natural to do this.

First painting you remember: I remember I always liked to see paintings, and the paintings that I can remember in the Art Institute are Giovanni di Paolo. I think it was because it had the Beheading of St. John the Baptist in it, which was sort of fascinatingly gory.

First job: I studied mechanical drawing and got a job. I was working for an industrial designer who was working for the Navy. My family didn’t want me to be drafted, so they kept telling the Navy that what I was doing was important.

First inspiration: My father, he was an architect. He built the house in which we lived. I think the chief influences on me as a child were my father’s interest in art and architecture.

First studio class: My first studio class was at The Art Students League in New York. They were life classes. They were drawing. Nobody taught painting there. You could paint if you wanted to, but they didn’t know how to paint. There wasn’t anybody in the League who knew how to paint. None of the teachers did. I don’t think anybody in America knew how to paint in oils at that time.

First trip to Europe: A cruise around the Mediterranean when I was fourteen. That’s where I discovered Titian.

First residence in New York City: On 15th Street. I had a room in a rooming house. A man came down from upstairs and introduced himself. He had seen a painting of mine in my room by Harold Weston. He knew Harold Weston and he invited me up to his apartment. He and his wife had a collection of Marin, O’Keeffe, Dove, and so on and so on. They were friends of Stieglitz, and I met Marin there at their house. I also met Paul Rosenfeld, who influenced me very much.

First studio in Maine: My father bought a house on Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot BayMaine  in 1912. In 1913 we spent our first summer there. I worked in a screened porch away from the house.

*Quotations from the artist are drawn from Fairfield Porter, Oral history interview with Fairfield Porter, 1968 June 6, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 


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