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From Church to Dove: One Hundred Years of American Painting from the Heckscher Museum of Art |
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Anne in Doorway
1974 Oil on canvas 47 x 37 inches Heckscher Museum of Art, Museum Purchase |
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After graduating from Harvard in 1928, Fairfield Porter studied with Thomas Hart Benton and Boardman Robinson at the Art Students League in New York (1928-30). Porter's art attracted little attention until 1952, when he was given his first one-man show at the Tibor de Nagy gallery, also in New York. A somewhat alien figure during the period when abstract-expressionism reigned supreme, Porter chose to remain a figurative painter. He stated, "I want to do everything the avant-garde theoreticians say you can't do." Anne in Doorway depicts the artist's wife, the poet Anne Elizabeth Channing, in the doorway of their summer home on Great Spruce Head Island in Maine. Describing this work as one of the artist's best portraits from this period of his career, critic Hilton Kramer has pointed out Porter's delightful "quotations" from other paintings included on the walls bordering the doorway. | ||