Fairfield Porter (1907-1975): Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction

Gives an good overview of the artist's paintings and thoughts. The images are good, but unfortunatelly some of them are in black and white.

This a very slim but large, almost square format publication, was published to accompany an exhibition of Porter's work in Boston 1983 and travelling elsewhere to conclude in New York in 1984. It opens with an introduction to the man Fairfield Porter, followed by an essay discussing his devolvement as an artist and what influenced him. This is followed by Jottings from a Diary, comments by John Bernard Myers. The main text concludes with a conversation between the artist and Paul Cummings. The book concludes with a detailed chronology, a comprehensive bibliography, and a list of the works exhibited. The book is illustrated throughout with full page plates, mostly in full colour but still with several in black and white. The reproductions are good, and convey the sense of light apparent in the artist's work, and the large square format of the book allows most of them to be reproduced at a good size. What comes across very clearly is the subtle simplicity of Porter's painting, and his sensitive and economic drawing of the human figure. While I have no quibble with the reproduction of the paintings, I do find the presentation of the text leaves much to be desired. Set in an oversized Pica like font with two unjustified columns to the page, massive paragraph spacing and too much white space evenly distributed, it has an amateurish appearance. In the apparent absence of any other realistically available publications illustrating Porter's work this is a very useful publication.