“We always argued. We always disagreed. Everything that one of us said, the other would say no to it. He told me I was very conceited. I thought my opinions were as good as his or better. And, he once said – I introduced him to de Kooning – he was publicizing Pollock and he said to de Kooning (he was painting the Women), ‘You can’t paint this way nowadays.’ And, I thought, ‘Who the hell is he to say that?’ 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.’ I might have become an abstract painter except for that.”  

In 1983, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston organized and exhibited a comprehensive retrospective of Porter’s work. It traveled to The Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. 

Among the several books that have been published on Porter’s work and his writings, a few of the most notable are: Art in its Own Terms, Selected Criticism 1935 – 1975 by Fairfield Porter, edited and with an introduction by Rackstraw Downes;  Fairfield Porter, An American Classic, edited by John T. Spike; Fairfield Porter, a Life in Art, by Justin Spring; Fairfield Porter, A Catalogue Raisonne of the Paintings, Watercolors and Pastels, edited by Joan Ludman; and Material Witness, the Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter, edited by Ted Leigh.