This essay was originally published in 2014 in the monograph, Mitchell Johnson: Color as Content.
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| Mitchell Johnson "Ferrovia (Winter)," 2004 38x78 inches oil/canvas |
Heir of Theirs:
Mitchell Johnson and Fairfield Porter
by Alexander Nemerov
A pleasing thing about Mitchell Johnson’s paintings is how they suggest other artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, Giorgio Morandi, and Josef Albers. The references are pleasing because they do not come across as superficial signs of “influence” any more than as melodramatic indications of heroic artistic struggle. Johnson is neither creating a superficial pastiche nor waging an epic battle to win a style of his own. Both those art historical stories make little sense when looking at his art.
Instead his paintings are achieved—that word, “achieved,” indicating a quiet and intense transit through the work of these other artists. That transit is a response and a correspondence between him and them, a felt connection, that leaves us outward signs of affinity, sure, but also a more elusive sense that Johnson knows these artists from the inside. And if that is the case, then what is pleasing about Johnson’s art is more exactly the presence of Bonnard and company, for any achieved art such as Johnson’s will carry within itself, as signs of its seriousness, not just references to previous artists but something intrinsic or essential to their pictures. What is pleasing, then, is that something essential would appear to live on, past those earlier painters’ long-ago deaths, in the art of this heir of theirs working in our own time. One such artist living in Johnson’s paintings is another of his acknowledged masters, Fairfield Porter.
Porter died in 1975 at the age of sixty-eight, after an approximately two-decade run as a painter of increasing strength and skill (his first one-person show was not until 1952, when he was forty-five). Working from his homes on Great Spruce Head Island, Maine, and Southampton, New York, Porter created masterpieces in the 1960s such as Morning Landscape (fig. 1), a Great Spruce Head picture showing his nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth, that invite comparison to a Johnson painting such as Ferrovia (Winter), of 2004 (fig. 2). The Albers-Morandi rectangle may palpitate at the upper center of Ferrovia, but the local colors of the railway workers’ clothing and safety vests, as well as the pole-and-rails architectonics of the railway yard, summon the brightness of Porter’s porch-screen harbor view. Despite the different handling and different subjects (Johnson’s painting shows a place in Italy), the color patches in each picture show the two painters’ common allegiance to Bonnard, whose retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art helped set Porter on his path when he saw it in 1948, the year after Bonnard’s death.
Another factor links Porter and Johnson—their common wish to make a painting be the record of two contrary things: the artist’s will and a scene’s resistance to that will. Porter’s friend James Schuyler wrote to him to say that “there seems to me to be an excitement in your pictures created by your desire, as a painter, to have your own way with your subject matter, that is at odds with a desire not to lose what it was that drew you to it in the first place, by tampering with it.” In Morning Landscape Porter imposes his choices of color and design, but the Maine location asks that he portray its own atmosphere, too, as a thing apart from his artistic will. Schuyler called the play of such contraries “an excellent tension.”
Johnson, by the same token, says he tries to combine “the reality of my emotional response to a situation or view with the formal demands of the painting.” A picture, in other words, becomes a record of what the painting requires—“the painting’s own voice,” Johnson calls it—and what the scene itself also demands. The hull of the red lobster boat in the Maine scene Cape Porpoise (Red Boat) asks that Johnson carve out its particular shape, that he learn its line, even as the painting requires him to make that hull abut either lateral edge of the canvas (fig. 3). Such a boat appears in the mid-ground of Porter’s The Dock, of 1974-75, where presumably it sits in equal obeisance to what a Maine harbor and this particular painting ask of it (fig. 4). The boat sits to one side of the dock, marking the end of it and, who knows (such the perceptual complexities), making that dock turn back around on itself and “return” to our space instead of just zooming away. This dock that neither comes nor goes also appears to float, thanks in part to the boat that buoys and lifts it there at the end, as if by some subtle tug of levitation. So it is that a painting is a composite of parts orchestrating an effect of the now, what Schuyler called Porter’s “exaltation in repose,” and so that term speaks to Johnson’s art, too.
But there is one way Porter is not present in Johnson’s paintings. Porter’s work can be brooding. Maybe this is what the critic Brian O’Doherty meant when he wrote of “the gathering quietness” of the pictures he saw in Porter’s show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1964—their sense of “nostalgia . . . re-created as an experience, not merely remembered.” Maybe for all its lyric color Morning Landscape, painted the following year, contains that sadness. Maybe, too, this melancholy was a New England phenomenon. Porter, “as taciturn as a New England minister” (in the recollection of the painter Larry Rivers), made pictures that seemed to combine Bonnard’s hedonism and Hawthorne’s reserve and even glumness. (It is difficult to specify how this is apparent in Morning Landscape except maybe in the way there is a touch of Hawthorne’s little Pearl in Porter’s daughter Elizabeth.) The poet John Ashbery, Porter’s friend, put it best when he wrote of “the dark light of space” that shows through Porter’s “transparent and porous” colors. Call this dark light the minister’s allegorical glimmer.
Maybe not just melancholy but a certain neurosis is a part of Porter’s work, too. It is a period affect, very mid-twentieth century in character, possibly New England in nature, too, wherein the world vibrates to one or the other side of contentment. Ashbery likened the reverberation of his friend’s paintings to “the fumbled parlor-piano tunes in the “Alcotts’ section of [Charles] Ives’s ‘Concord’ Sonata.” The pictures likewise put one in mind of writers such as J. D. Salinger, so that in Porter’s art it is somehow always “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” The house in Porter’s well-known painting Island Farmhouse (1969), built by Porter’s father James in 1926, featured two big decorative interior panels of a male and female dragon, painted by James and looking like something out of The Wizard of Oz, that Porter both could not stand and yet insisted be kept in place. These psychological things loaded and overloaded never appear in Island Farmhouse, yet somehow they form part of its atmosphere.
Johnson’s painting is not to be faulted for being without these psychological tones. His art is his own achievement, and of course he is not obliged to carry forward all nuances, depths, and over-shadings, of the artists he admires. This is even supposing that such a complete transference were desirable or even possible. More likely, it is vitally important for Johnson, as it would be for any artist, to “misread” or otherwise adjust the earlier artist’s work until it takes on the look of something new and personally “right” to him, adapted to meet his own sense of things.
But the missing part of Porter’s art in Johnson’s pictures raises an interesting question about the presence of Porter in Johnson’s art. If Johnson does not “get” Porter in this way, then is Porter really present in his work? If not, again, it is no big deal, not necessarily. But if he is not, then a certain true lineage with an earlier art—with that of a mid-twentieth century painter—is here actually not a lineage at all. There is a carry-over, a felt connection, an affinity, to be sure, and that is the seriousness of Johnson’s pictures, but there is not a lineage. And if there is not a lineage, then Porter does not “live” in Johnson’s art. That does not mean Porter’s art is dead, far from it, but it does mean that his pictures await another soul who would speak with their voice.
1 James Schuyler, letter to Fairfield Porter, n. d., quoted in Justin Spring, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 205-6.
2 Mitchell Johnson, quoted in Peter Campion, “Giving Life to Painting: An Interview,” in Mitchell Johnson: New Paintings (St. Helena, California: I. Wolk Gallery, 2005), 6.
3 Schuyler, letter to Porter, quoted in Spring, 206.
4 Brian O’Doherty, “Art: By Fairfield Porter; His School of Paris Works, Which Bring the Outdoors In, Shown at de Nagy’s,” New York Times, May 24, 1964, p. 32.
5 Larry Rivers, What Did I Do? The Unauthorized Autobiography (New York: Aaron Asher Books/HarperCollins, 1992), 266; quoted in Spring, 194.
6 John Ashbery, “Respect for Things As They Are,” in Ashbery and Kenworth Moffett, Fairfield Porter (1907-1975): Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 13.
7 Ashbery, “Respect for Things As They Are,” 13.
8 Eliot Porter, Summer Island: Penobscot Country (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1966), 51; quoted in Spring, 209.
Alexander Nemerov is a Professor of Art and Art History at Stanford University.
