New York, NY—November 18, 2008—Betty Cuningham Gallery is pleased to announce a two person show of works on paper by Andrew Forge and Fairfield Porter opening on Saturday, December 13, 2008 at 541 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th Avenues. The show will feature a broad selection of works by each artist, including approximately 16 watercolors by Forge and 12 of Porter’s ink and pencil drawings.
“For me, painting does not illustrate or prove anything; neither ‘realism’ nor ‘abstraction’…”
-Fairfield Porter, “Art in its Own Terms”, MFA Publications, 2008, p. 282.
Fairfield Porter joked that he may have become an abstract artist had it not been for a comment Clement Greenberg made that figurative art had become obsolete (referring to Willem de Kooning’s Women). Porter resisted Greenberg’s thinking and spent his career painting and drawing landscapes and portraits. When he worked, Porter focused on the individual shapes which made up his subject as opposed to the finished image he was creating. Similarly in his drawings Porter focuses on edges – those of an island, a corner, a rooftop, or a tree.
Like Porter’s works on paper, Forge’s are reductive and can be read as notations. These later works in this exhibition are composed of dots of color. The dots are carefully placed, one influencing the next. Similar to Porter, Forge’s work depended on a specific view, but unlike Porter, Forge’s images are more about the reflected light and less of the form.
In addition to their distinctive artistic styles, both Forge and Porter are celebrated writers. Forge is known for his writings on Monet, Giacometti, Degas, Manet, and Rauschenberg, among others. Porter is particularly known for his art criticism as well as for his poetry. Among the several books that have been published on Porter’s work and his writings, the gallery has available Art in its Own Terms, Selected Criticism 1935 – 1975 by Fairfield Porter, edited by and with an introduction by Rackstraw Downes, republished by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2008.
Andrew Forge was born in Kent, England in 1923. He exhibited in the United States upon his arrival here in the 1970’s through his death in 2002. Forge served as dean of the Yale University School of Art and was a professor there for nearly two decades. His work can be found in numerous public collections, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Yale University, New Haven, CT; Tate Gallery, London, England; and the Arts Council of Great Britain. He was the recipient of numerous awards: a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 1980; The American Academy of Arts and Letters Painting Prize, 1990; and a Distinguished Teaching of Art Award, College Art Association, 1995.
Fairfield Porter was born in 1907 in Illinois, was educated at Harvard, and spent much of his life on Long Island and in Maine. He began showing with Tibor de Nagy in 1952 and continued showing there until 1970. Porter died in Southampton in 1975; his estate is represented by Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York. Upon Porter’s death, his widow, Anne Porter, donated approximately 250 of his works to The Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, which now holds the largest collection of Porter’s work.
The exhibition will remain on view through Saturday, January 31, 2009. For further information and/or photographs, please contact the gallery at 212-242-2772 or info@bettycuninghamgallery.com
