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If you discover a painting in your attic with strikingly remote<\/em> human figures in it, don\u2019t throw it away. It might be a Fairfield Porter (1907-1975).<\/p>\nAs Time<\/em> magazine art critic Robert Hughes writes, \u201cThere was always an awkwardness to Porter\u2019s treatment of the human body\u2013a Yankee stiffness, the opposite of [Pierre] Bonnard\u2019s sensuous fluency. The figures in his paintings are never not in the right place, but his work didn\u2019t show much feel for the movement or the solid presence of the body, and it always preferred sociability to any hint of sensuality\u2013a trait also shared by [Maine painter Alex] Katz. He never painted a nude. What he connected to best was landscape, houses, interiors. There, the reticence he brought to the scrutiny of other people melted away. Not that the landscapes are more \u2018expressive\u2019; they just radiate more freedom, and a fuller sense of Porter\u2019s desire to find concrete shapes that spoke on their own: presences. \u2018The presence in a painting,\u2019 he once wrote, \u2018is like the presence a child feels and recognizes in things and the way they relate, like a doorknob, the slant of a roof or its flatness, or the personality of a tool. Art does not succeed by compelling you to like it, but by making you feel this presence in it. Is someone there? This someone can be impersonal.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n And there<\/em> it is\u2013the collective spareness<\/em> of Maine\u2019s scalar universe, where we\u2019re thrilled by the murmur of gulls we can\u2019t see in the fog, the stillness of a September night, the otherworldliness of flapping laundry, the celebrity of a stone. It\u2019s part of what I love about living here\u2013our black humor and shyness and the extraordinary \u201creticence\u201d of our personal distances. I wonder, is our beautiful state actually staring at us, whispering you can\u2019t get here from there?<\/em><\/p>\n This sort of magic is quite in vogue, by the way. The impersonal, personal Maine of Porter\u2019s The Table on the Porch<\/em>, no doubt painted at his longtime family retreat on Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay, sold this year for $326,500 at Sotheby\u2019s New York, topping pre-auction estimates of $100,000 to $150,000. Not quite so verbose nine years earlier, Porter had decocted the essence of his stillness to The Porch<\/em>, which coincidentally brought $554,500 at Sotheby\u2019s in recent months, besting estimates of $250,000 to $350,000. Who knows how much he\u2019d have fetched if he\u2019d edited it down to just Porch<\/em>?<\/p>\n
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