September 2010

If you discover a painting in your attic with strikingly remote human figures in it, don’t throw it away. It might be a Fairfield Porter (1907-1975).

As Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes writes, “There was always an awkwardness to Porter’s treatment of the human body–a Yankee stiffness, the opposite of [Pierre] Bonnard’s sensuous fluency. The figures in his paintings are never not in the right place, but his work didn’t show much feel for the movement or the solid presence of the body, and it always preferred sociability to any hint of sensuality–a trait also shared by [Maine painter Alex] Katz. He never painted a nude. What he connected to best was landscape, houses, interiors. There, the reticence he brought to the scrutiny of other people melted away. Not that the landscapes are more ‘expressive’; they just radiate more freedom, and a fuller sense of Porter’s desire to find concrete shapes that spoke on their own: presences. ‘The presence in a painting,’ he once wrote, ‘is like the presence a child feels and recognizes in things and the way they relate, like a doorknob, the slant of a roof or its flatness, or the personality of a tool. Art does not succeed by compelling you to like it, but by making you feel this presence in it. Is someone there? This someone can be impersonal.’”

And there it is–the collective spareness of Maine’s scalar universe, where we’re thrilled by the murmur of gulls we can’t see in the fog, the stillness of a September night, the otherworldliness of flapping laundry, the celebrity of a stone. It’s part of what I love about living here–our black humor and shyness and the extraordinary “reticence” of our personal distances. I wonder, is our beautiful state actually staring at us, whispering you can’t get here from there?

This sort of magic is quite in vogue, by the way. The impersonal, personal Maine of Porter’s The Table on the Porch, no doubt painted at his longtime family retreat on Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay, sold this year for $326,500 at Sotheby’s New York, topping pre-auction estimates of $100,000 to $150,000. Not quite so verbose nine years earlier, Porter had decocted the essence of his stillness to The Porch, which coincidentally brought $554,500 at Sotheby’s in recent months, besting estimates of $250,000 to $350,000. Who knows how much he’d have fetched if he’d edited it down to just Porch?

For a list of sensational Porter auction results, visit Online Extras.