two gemini painters: Fairfield Porter and Velasquez

Fairfield Porter movingly captured the American suburban pastoral, snapshotty in composition, in occasion, in cropping, even in rapidity of execution.

As in many Gemini artists (Gauguin, Rouault, Gottleib, Steinberg, perhaps even Courbet) a certain awkwardness evokes a certain manner with which to conceal itself.

At a Porter show  in 1992 it seemed that every other painting was of a pair of something: a pair of houses, a pair of boats, of people, of trees, a couple of chairs, a
mixed doubles match,  etc.  The show was titled "Porter Pairings." A curator had intuited Porter's Geminian nature.

One of Porter’s most notable canvases, The Mirror, is a direct homage to Velasquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas, a work that incorporates a mirror to profound effect. The mirror, of course, is a principal visual Geminism, and Velasquez, one of the greatest “hands” in the history of painting, was himself, also, a Gemini.                                                                                                                                            

Velasquez,
Las Meninas
(detail), Prado


Porter is an elegist of John Cheever country, and the two Geminis had much else in common:  both husbands and fathers juggling family ties with a bisexual identity, both artistic WASPS with intense sibling issues. Porter was 4th in a brood of five children, one of his three brothers was the well-known photographer Eliot Porter. Cheever had a notorious love/hate relationship with his older brother, and his fiction is marked with fratricide and incest.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Fairfield Porter: Art in its Own Terms. Selected Criticism 1935-1975. vg/vg, rare, $45.