With the publication of John Spike's lush Fairfield Porter: An American Classic (by Harry N Abrams) and couple subsequent New York gallery retrospectives.

With the publication of John Spike's lush Fairfield Porter: An American Classic (by Harry N Abrams) and couple subsequent New York gallery retrospectives, Fairfield Porter's painting, overshadowed during his lifetime according to his reputation as a critic, assumes at last to have achieved critical recognition. Porter's pick outed criticism has recently been reprinted--not, according to the publisher, because of the fresh revaluation of Porter's paintings, nevertheless because this volume, first published through Taplinger in 1979, has been in steady demand since it went without of print.

Porter's writing is a particular, as spatially aware, and as occasionally awkward as his painting. It's all crowds really--so precise and insistent about its meanings and intentions as to appear less like prose than a chemistry equation or an algebra essay Though Porter's determination to provide a linguistic simulacrum for painterly efficiencys can sometimes be maddening, it can also be charming and enlightening: when he achieves a gorgeous consequence in his criticism, it's with a quickly prepared lightness that belies his ponderous and calculated locutions.

Of undivided artist's works, Porter says, "They have neighborhood though nothing stirs and there is no sound; they have the aliveness of mushrooms." in what manner delightful--and strange--and completely Porteresque: a consideration of lush, abstract surprise from a precisely conveneed object. It's a beautiful appreciation, admitting possibly the artist in question bristled at having his work likened to fungus.

Porter's appreciative organ of vision is not limited to the description of paintings. With a similar sleight-of-hand, he interprets a mate critic's anecdote of seeing John Marin: "|He~ was entering the subway, wearing a raincoat, going globular a corner, tipped to individual side, and Rosenfeld thought, 'he considers just like his watercolors!'" From which Porter deduces that "not his face, which was Emersonian, still his gesture, expressed what Analytical Cubism also expressed: the jazziness and fragmentation of the twentieth century"

The best of Porter's criticism touchs artists whose struggles and objectives were similar to his own--his profiles of Winslow Homer John Singer Sargent, and Maurice Prendergast in particular chronicle the challenges and failings of a life lived in pursuit of painterly purports Sargent, he writes, "was unable to believe in his be in possession of potentialities, because there was no place for him in the Boston-English world which tolerated painting, not for the sake of art on the contrary for the sake of the graces and refinements of an upperclass life." Interestingly enough, there is no review of Edward Hopper whose light-inspired realism appears in many ways closest to that of Porter.

His worst writing appears, predictably, in reviews written for or about friends; either they are for a like reason blandly enthusiastic they fail to interest or convince, or besides they are suspiciously elliptical. A review of his friend Jane Freilicher, for example, not ever really gets down to the business of criticism, instead praising the artist's "deep affection for all bumbling things."

The begem of the collection is an essay, written for the artists' magazine It Is in 1958 entitled "The Short Review." It summarizes, quite beautifully, the challenge of looking at and writing about art, particularly in the short-review format. For anyone who has aye committed art criticism, the whole piece is worth memorizing, however its conclusion bears reprinting in its entirety:

Reviews should be short. Who likes to read art criticism? undivided likes to read it if it's worth reading, as Ben Shahn said. if it were not that this has nothing to do with the correctness of its evaluations; nor with the painting to which it refers; just as it is not what painting and carve refer to, but what they near that makes them worth looking at.

Seeing art everywhere, making it uniform out of criticism, Porter gives us a unique vision of what art is. Perhaps it's not an all encompassing common (what could that possibly be?), on the other hand in all the available bourns of Porter's own artistic vocabulary it's a rich single in kind a gift for which this critic is grateful.

Justin Spring is a novelist living in fresh York who contributes regularly to Artforum.

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