Fairfield Porter's paintings have a strange pale quality, and they are flooded with light.His subjects are upper class domestic,and many of them are pale and etherial. He painted his family friends,and their pvt haunts beautifully. Little did most people realize he was a torn person,and probably can be better understood by this reading.I think what amazed me the most about this book was the incredible latent homosexual exsistence that paralled and co-existed within Porter's very homey and simmering homogenous realism.The bio details his social, artistic and private relationships with a younger generation of artists. This book is a portrait of a man at war with his sexuality. His ptngs are beautifully orchestrated, sensual, understated. A must for those that want to know more about Porter's life, and the different sides that lived inside him. A good read!I love artist bios.This is a worthy effort.

Justin Spring's biography on Fairfield Porter, A Life In Art, is one of the most difficult and disturbing biographies I've read in some time. It's incredibly thorough, as if no piece of information was left out.

Most biographies are bound to reveal new information, but the amount here is overwhelming. Other reviews here on Amazon bring out the detail, so there's no point repeating it. If you're only familiar with Porter from an artisitic standpoint the biography of his family life, lifestyle, manners, and politics will be shocking and difficult to bring together.

While in the middle of reading this book I had to let it go for a few months and read other things then go back to it. Porter's activities in the late 1940's to the mid 1950's were especially difficult to reconcile considering the subject matter of his output.

It seems the frankness in tone of the biography is totally in tune with Porter's ways of communicating. I suspect if Porter had lived longer then such an autobiography probably would have been as revealing.

This book displays great beauty: the paper is beautiful, the writing is flawless and the subject matter (the art work) is cool and elegant. But the artist's life was a difficult & complex equation of contractions: he was born patrician, yet he was a leftist (he attended Socialist demonstrations in a chauffeur driven limousine); he was highly verbal and intellectual, yet he painted the coolest (visually abstract) emotion; he made realist art in an abstract art time; he was married yet he had sex with men; he was surrounded by a loving family, yet he remained remote and distant; he lived in the country, yet he was always running to the city; he was bright and balanced, yet his best (lifelong) friend was mentally deranged; he made the most stable art from the most unstable life; he was slender and active, yet he died early of a surprise heart attack; he was on the verge of greatness (and nearly penniless much of the time), but cared little for fame and less for money. This assortment of profound conflicts make for a great story, and the art works themselves tower above everything in their lofty remove, quiet dignity, and timeless spirit. Find out why that is so (and what it may mean for the history of 20th century art criticism) and read this haunting and very personal book you'll not forget.

The format, color plates and essay about Porter's life are all well done. However, it seems to me that despite his excellent reputation, Porter at best is a mediocre painter who draws awkardly. If you already like him, buy the book. But if you are looking for good representational art, look elsewhere.

It is no secret that Mr. Porter was a rogue of twentieth-century art. Where abstraction and "modern" themes ruled the endeavours of most contemporary artists, Mr. Porter returned to classical figuration. He did, however, have something new to say. Spike sifts through the strata of Mr. Porter's life and connects them well with development of his work. He helps the reader understand Porter's unique vision amidst his tumultuous and, at times, bizarre activities. To an untrained eye, Mr. Porter's paintings may appear to be the work of a mere amateur. However, careful analysis of both this text and the color plates, not to mention actual museum visits, yield a wonderful fruit: a more lucid appreciation of one America's greatest painters to date. That is reward enough in itself. If the work of Mr. Porter captures you, investigate Morandi, Diebenkorn and the Bay Area Figurative Painters, and the contemporary landscape painter, Neil Welliver. Enjoy.

An intimate gem of a book with Porter's biography threaded through luminous paintings of portraits and landscapes. A book I treasure and recommend to any painter, especially plein air painters, for both inspiration and to add to the shelf of resource books. When I purchased Wolf Kahn's book, Porter was listed on Amazon's "customers who bought this book also bought:" I'm glad I went for it. A great recommend! nhammerart@earthlink.net

Anne Porter's volume of poetry "An Altogether Different Language" is salve for souls aching from post-modernism. Her sparse but lyrical poetry finds "fransican joy in created things," as her editor David Shapiro put it. Her subjects are nature, God, and loving relationships. Anne Porter was not a poet by trade, but wrote these over the course of 60 years. She was in her-mid eighties when they were finally published in this volume, which was a National Book Award finalist.