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century," overesteems the esthetic significance of his art enormously, yet
for Ashbery, in art the intellect filtered through down-home nonchalance
counts much more than the agon of modernism. "Porter was, of course,
only the latest of a series of brilliant know-nothings who at intervals
have embodied the American genius, from Emerson to Thoreau to
Whitman and Dickinson down to Wallace Stevens and Marianne
Moore." He means they have no ideas that can be extracted from paint
itself - a kind of art-for-art's sake that may be found in all sorts of
canvases whether figurative or not. Updike, reviewing the retrospective
of Porter's works mounted at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for
which Ashbery wrote a catalogue essay, remains unpersuaded: "It is hard
not to feel, reading the forewards that Mr. Moffett and John Ashbery
have written for the catalogue, that this earnest, cranky rich man's son
was a bit patronized in the heady art circles of Manhattan and its
exurban enclaves." For once, Updike distrusts decorum; being well-bred
is not to be confused with esthetic rigor.
MARJORIE WELISH
