Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Millions

    Fairfield Porter: Artist, Writer, Heretic

    by Bill Morris May 23, 2019 5 minutes

    In the early 1950s, during the high noon of Abstract Expressionism, the painter Willem de Kooning did something heretical. He started incorporating the recognizable figures of women in his lush, muscular pictures. One fine boozy evening, Clement Greenberg, the don of New York art critics, walked up to de Kooning in the Cedar Tavern and issued what amounted to a fatwa. “You’re dead,” Greenberg told de Kooning. “You can’t paint this way nowadays.”

    This decree from on high had an unintended effect on one of de Kooning’s friends and early champions, the figurative painter . “I thought, ‘Who the hell is he to say that?’” Porter wrote later. “He said, ‘You can’t paint figuratively today.’ I thought, ‘If that’s what he says, I think I will do just exactly what he says I can’t do! That’s all I will do.’

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Millions

    The Millions4 min read
    Why Write Memoir? Two Debut Authors Weigh In
    "It was hard on many levels, and I had to keep going back to why I was writing in the first place." The post Why Write Memoir? Two Debut Authors Weigh In appeared first on The Millions.
    The Millions19 min read
    Several Attempts at Understanding Percival Everett
    I knew from the dozens of other interviews I had read with him that Everett doesn’t love doing press. “I wonder why?” he joked to me. The post Several Attempts at Understanding Percival Everett appeared first on The Millions.
    The Millions6 min read
    Against ‘Latin American Literature’
    The classification of “Latin American literature” puts both Anglophone and Hispanophone writers in a double bind. The post Against ‘Latin American Literature’ appeared first on The Millions.

    Related