More than a gentleman painter.

Fairfield Porter
A Life in Art
Justin Spring
Yale University Press, $35, 383 pp.

Fairfield Porter (1907E75), Justin Spring argues in this new biography of the painter, art critic, and poet, has not been given his due and will not be appreciated until his work in all media-"an essentially diaristic project in which the artist perpetually sought to define his relation to the world"-is taken into account. This book makes an excellent start.

A good painter, an accomplished art critic, and a published poet, Porter maintained a stubborn allegiance to representational painting at a time when American art was deeply committed to abstract expressionism. This has always pushed him to the sidelines, but it also has enhanced a reading of Porter as a strong-minded painter who pursued his own artistic vision. At his best, he communicated a profound attachment to the here and now-an almost philosophic meditation on the nature of reality. He painted the emptiness of occupied rooms, objects left in disarray, moments between activities, and the silence of people alone and in groups.

Directly descended from the late-nineteenth-century domestic scenes of the French Intimist painters Edouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, which Porter first saw at an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938 and admired all his life, his paintings are in a certain sense antimodern, as was Porter himself. Porter's antipathy to technology is a theme in Spring's book. He quotes a wonderful description of life in the Porter home by the poet Ron Padgett, who lived in the Porters' rambling colonial house in Southampton, Long Island, for several summers. Padgett speaks of stoking the coal stove that supplied the heat, winding the mechanical clocks, the lack of television, radio, and newspapers. In Porter's world there were the house and the ocean down the street. There was also the family house in Maine where Porter vacationed as a boy and where he took his own family as often as they could afford to go. These are the subjects of his paintings. In a sense, he reasserted the Victorian paradigm of the home as a place where art and domesticity reigned, separate and apart from the outside world of technology and commerce.

Porter was born into the sort of American family that Henry James portrayed in his fiction. His father managed the family's real estate holdings while indulging his own passions as an amateur architect and biologist. His mother, an intelligent and capable woman, published poetry and attended to the education of her children. Among the Porters' distinguished relatives was T.S. Eliot, with whom Fairfield seems to have had little contact. Fairfield's eldest brother, Eliot Porter, was a gifted and successful photographer who exhibited in the most acclaimed avant-garde art gallery in New York-Alfred Stieglitz's 291. Like his father and brothers before him, Fairfield attended Harvard. He later traveled to Europe, where he spent time in Italy with Bernard Berenson, visited the Soviet Union with a group of American socialists eager to explore the new society, and upon his return to the United States married the poet Anne Channing and moved to New York. Anne Channing Porter, who is still living and whose poems have appeared in the pages of this magazine, contributes much to this biography. Spring makes a virtue of necessity, quoting from her letters and conversations extensively. Her recollections and musings on the past enliven the facts that he uncovers and soften some of the criticisms aimed by family and old friends at the sometimes irascible Porter.

Although the first half of the book lacks a certain focus, the pace picks up as soon as Porter meets the poets who came to be known as the New York School. Spring's conversations with many of Porter's friends give him the ability to set Porter convincingly in the bohemian social ambience of New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He writes knowledgeably about poetry and does a good job of locating the essential character of Porter's art, art criticism, and verse in the orbit of Mallarme, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, James Schuyler, John Ashbery, and Anne Porter. One of the most moving stories in the book concerns the triangular relationship among Fairfield, Anne, and James Schuyler, whom the Porters came to know in the mid-1950s. By then Porter, who had been writing art criticism for several years, had become friendly with Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and the painters Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers. Not unusually for the time and place, sexual preferences in this group were mixed. Porter, who had acknowledged his own bisexual yearnings years earlier, and Schuyler briefly became lovers with Anne Porter's knowledge. For years after the liaison ended, Schuyler, who was emotionally unstable, was supported both financially and emotionally by the Porters; he lived with them in their home on Long Island, and vacationed with them in Maine. This enabled him to write some of the best poetry of his career, but it was an enormous strain on the Porter family. Spring sensitively navigates through this terrain presenting the facts and letting the principals and friends speak through letters and reminiscences without attempting to simplify what was clearly a very complex relationship fraught with shades of parental responsibility, intellectual admiration, and sexual urges.

The book is not without faults. On occasion, repetitions and inconsistencies mar the flow of the narrative. There are also points where the author's lack of critical distance results in an overabundance of truly insignificant details (college grades), quotes from letters that say little of interest, and a tendency to try to protect Porter from the accusation that he was a gentleman painter. In fact, Porter never had to struggle with poverty; to suggest, as Spring does, that he suffered because of the exceptional circumstances that allowed him to paint without worrying about feeding a growing family (he and Anne Porter had five children), is to see the world askew. But these criticisms are small in light of the book's success. By intelligently exploring the artist's full range-his paintings, his criticism, his poetry, and his writings-Spring creates a fully rounded portrait of an important American painter who is still too often overlooked simply for his choice of subject.

Donna Gustafson is chief curator of exhibits at the American Academy of Arts.