Fairfield Porter: Selected Masterworks Hardcover – 11 Oct. 2016

This is a good book. Covers a good amount of his paintings.Good seller too

I'd been on the look-out for an affordable book on Porter for some time and this one is a cracker.A large and heavy hardback, it's a very well-illustrated volume with 109 listed colour plates of the paintings supplemented by numerous details; most of the plates are large (many of the details are full-page bleeds) and it provides a fairly good balance of all the artist's output with portraits, interiors, still life and landscape all represented.Porter is a painter's painter and I love his lush use of oil paint and the deceptive simplicity of his brushwork - only the churlish would carp at this lavish volume.It's a pity there is no “Look inside “ option available so one could make one's own judgement.A terrific book to look through and study - I'm very pleased with this indeed.

Lovely reproductions - a gem for anyone interested in this unfairly neglected painter

A surprisingly large book full of lots of repoductions of Fairfield Porter's work. What text there was, was short and told me very little about the artist, his life or his work. No sense of his progression or progress. Very unilluminating and rather lazy of the writers.

Like so many, the art director of this book does not want to be bound by silly, demeaning rules such as making the layout serve the reader. So we get page numbers that are tiny and printed in faint type near the inside of the page (so helpful!). I was surprised, when I received this book, to see how few pictures it illustrated, in proportion to the number of pages. This is why: many left-hand pages are blank--why? many are not, so it's not a style. The book also devotes many single pages and many double-page spreads to "details" from paintings that are also illustrated in full. But these "details" portray half or more of the painting, and in several instances portray all of the painting except a few centimeters at the edge. What is the purpose of this? In the case of the two-page reproductions, the value of the extra space is cancelled by the distraction of the picture's being chopped in half by the fold and falling into the valley it makes.Now, some people may think this is wonderful--those who love to pore over every brush mark. But I find it maddening to be served up the same picture twice, especially at virtually the same size, instead of having those pages, and the blank ones, used for more reproductions. To me, this is not good value. And, as if to rub our noses in what we are missing, the introduction mentions painting after painting of Porter's as exceptional or notable--and these are not included in the book!The book contains many pictures that were not reproduced in the larger Porter book of 20 years ago, and a few in colour that in that book were reproduced in black and white. I am glad to have these. But my interest in Porter is in his portraits, still lifes, and interiors, and this book has far too many landscapes for my taste--then again, of course, someone who wants a lot of landscapes will be pleased.It's too bad the publishers did not eliminate all these redundant reproductions and either issue a slimmer and cheaper book, or fill the pages with the many more paintings of Porter's that are worth seeing and so make this (as I had hoped it would be) a true replacement for the earlier book (which costs five times more) rather than a supplement.