Fairfield Porter
Hymn to Life (2), 1973
watercolor on paper
26 x 33 1/2 framed
Private collection

This exhibition, timed to coincide with the publication of Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, brings together an intimate group of works by ten of Schuyler’s painter friends, pairing them with his poems or excerpts from reviews. 

James Schuyler (1923-1991) was a charter member of the so-called New York School of poets, along with his friends John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara, and like them was also close to a group of abstract and figurative painters of the same generation (or older). These painters included Fairfield Porter, Pat Passlof, Milton Resnick, Alex Katz, Joan Mitchell, Jane Freilicher, Grace Hartigan, Joe Brainard, Anne Dunn, Darragh Park, among many others. As a regular writer for Art News from 1955 through 1960 and intermittently after that, Schuyler knew and wrote about all these artists, and was especially close to several of them, not least Fairfield Porter with whom he lived for eleven years.

Schuyler is often described as an especially “visual” poet, and once said he wanted to write poems that were “like Fairfield Porter’s paintings.” It could be said that he achieved this, although not necessarily in any obvious or expected sense. Reviewing Fairfield’s 1967 exhibition at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, Schuyler saw qualities that could apply equally well to his own poetry:

The paint is not, however, merely a vehicle for description… The paint is itself a palpable fact that holds an imprint of life and infuses life into the image… Its art is one that values the everyday as the ultimate, the most varied and desirable knowledge. [The paintings’] concern is with immediacy.

Both Porter and Schuyler transformed the fleeting, quotidian experiences of daily life into physical form with such close attention that the act of transformation—how paint or words work or fail to work as description—became their true subject. Fellow gestural realist painters like Jane Freilicher and Alex Katz shared this outlook to some degree.  

Schuyler found additional points of contact with other artists: the shared use of collage technique shaped his relationship to the art of Joe Brainard; the gestural abstractions of Joan Mitchell, Grace Hartigan, Pat Passlof, Milton Resnick and others were echoed in the sense of improvisation and open-endedness in Schuyler’s poetry.

Most important was Schuyler’s ability to identify with the painters, to enter into their personal worlds not only socially through friendships and studio visits, but imaginatively. As a reviewer he held to the dictum that Fairfield Porter passed on to him: “Description is the best criticism.”