Fairfield Porter: Raw: The Creative Process of an American Master

An exhibition that hung Fairfield Porter's paintings unframed, unstretched and often unfinished, and a book that argues the unfinished quality was never an accident but the condition of the work.

Klaus Ottmann, then Robert Lehman Curator at the Parrish Art Museum, selects some forty paintings and works on paper from the museum's Porter collection, given by the artist's widow after his death in 1975. Alongside completed canvases the Parrish holds a rare concentration of half-finished ones, painted on Masonite, cardboard, aluminium sheet and other salvage, and the installation left them bare - stretchers unframed, boards leaning on picture rails - so the support was as visible as the image. The volume includes a sketchbook facsimile and Ottmann's essay "An Unfinished Quality: Fairfield Porter's Creative Process." It accompanied the exhibition at the Parrish in Southampton, New York, 11 April to 13 June 2010, which travelled to the Middlebury College Museum of Art in 2011.

Fairfield Porter (1907-1975) painted the interiors, gardens and family life of Southampton and Great Spruce Head Island while working as a critic for ARTnews and The Nation, holding to representation through the years when American painting was expected to abandon it.