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PARTISAN REVIEW
Between the forties and the sixties, everything changes in New
York- Paris relations. Paris comes to the end of a great cycle, and
New York grows older and wiser. The American artist begins to
regard the Parisian artist as an equal and then an inferior.
If
Paris
still spells romance, certainly there's no more of the American's
agonized yearning, his starry-eyed awe . By the sixties everybody is
talking about living in a global village. Its art center is New York.
Youth travels to discover its newly found internationalism - the way
its habits are the same in Berkeley or Paris, how its confreres take to
the streets for more or less the same reasons everywhere.
Paris and New York become a very odd couple-the capitals,
respectively, of the early twentieth century and the later twentieth
century.
r
wish I were reeling around Paris
instead of reeling around New York
I wish I weren't reeling at
all.
This is the poet Frank O'Hara, a friend to many artists, and he can't
seem to make up his mind where he stands in these transatlantic af–
fairs.
In the sixties Fairfield Porter began a series of very beautiful
paintings of New York. Porter doesn't see the city in terms of iconic
images like Georgia O'Keeffe's skyscraper, Joseph Stella's Brooklyn
Bridge. He comes to the subject with a taste for small, delicate shifts
of co lor and scale that's in essence very European - owed
to
Vuillard
and Bonnard. Porter chooses as his subject not the booming public
city, but the city of the artists. He paints Astor Place, the hub of the
little world where from the thirties through the fifties
Partisan Review
had its offices and the members of the avant-garde rented cold-water
lofts along Eighth Street and Tenth Street. He paints Union Square,
just above Fourteenth Street, another landmark for the artists, the
traditional northern border of the bohemian downtown scene. And
he also paints midtown, the section of fancy galleries, of money and
success.
In all these canvases Porter catches the open, sprawling
character of the city and its high, clear, revelatory light. Though
there may be patches of New York where one can find the perfectly
composed little square, the street as a theater or a stage that's famil–
iar from Balthus and Helion, Porter knows this isn't the essence of
this city. He avoids the obviously picturesque as unfaithful
to
New
f
l
