Selections from 
The Fairfield Porter Papers

Fairfield Porter watercolor sketch of Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, looking toward Little Spruce Head Island in the distance, ca.1970.

Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), still best remembered as a painter, is now also seen as one of the most articulate art critics of his generation. A poet, philosopher, and political intellectual, Porter's writings and correspondence provide a detailed chronicle of life in the American art world from his undergraduate days at Harvard to the year of his death.

In researching the biography Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art, Justin Spring relied heavily on the Fairfield Porter papers in the Archives of American Art and also on a lengthy interview with Porter, conducted by Paul Cummings in 1968 for the Archives' Oral History Program. While writing the biography, Spring also organized and cataloged an additional gift to the Archives of Porter's papers from the artist's widow, Anne Elizabeth Channing Porter.  

An exhibition currently in the Archives of American Art's New York Regional Center co-curated by Spring, and the Archives' Manuscript Curator, Liza Kirwin, brings together over sixty photographs, letters, sketches, notebooks, and printed materials from Porter's papers,  as well as a few items from the papers of his friend Richard Stankiewicz and a letter from gallery owner John Bernard Myers. 

The exhibition will be on view from March 16 to October 6, 2000.  This web version includes a portion only of the documents in the New York Center, and can be viewed from the accompanying links in the Checklist to the Exhibition.