The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility Over Ignorance Giovanni Battista Tiepolo c. 1740-50 The Norton Simon Foundation
I’ve chosen this beautiful painting as the emblem for this post because I think it clearly illustrates aspects of Tiepolo’s vocabulary that Porter absorbed and used in his own painting, e.g. the very subtle and close value relationships, the mass of black, the small hit of red.
Porter’s interest in Tiepolo is evidenced by his decision, in 1949, to copy this painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Adoration of the Magi Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
In the short reviews that Porter wrote for ARTnews, I was particularly struck by the commentary that focused specifically on the basic vocabulary of painting. In total, the reviews have a cumulative effect reading like an extended painting tutorial. Here are a few of the topics he returned to repeatedly. These were clearly aspects of the craft of painting of particular concern to him.
Add quotes from short reviews under each “topic”.
Value/Color
Schuyler “Immediacy Is the Message” ARTnews March 1967
A propos of composition, (Porter) once said, “The right use of color can make any composition work,” and that in face the color is the composition. He likes a coherent, unmuddy, close adjustment of values, such as he found in Fra Angelico and in De Kooning: an adjustment in which the colors affect one another within the picture, and give it the fullness of range (the light within the room, the light outside the window) which the eye so much more readily grasps than does a camera.
Black
FP was very interested in how one gets black to “work” in a painting. In reviews and articles he notes how other artists use black. He often includes large and small masses of black in his painting and always manages to get it to hold its place.
Couple with Pears and Chrysanthemums 1975
Nancy Porter Straus 1973
While in Nice in 1918 Matisse took a few recent paintings to show Renoir. The aged and frail artist was particularly interested in The Open Window, remarking that “…the darkest tone of that picture, a black curtain pole above the window, held its plane in the space…He asked Matisse to hold the picture some distance away and exclaimed, ‘But how did you do that? If I put a black like that in a picture, it would jump forward, it wouldn’t stay in place.” (Flam, p. 469)
Renoir might have made a similar comment about the phone in Girl and Geranium. How blacks work, or don’t, is an issue that was an ongoing concern for Porter. In his criticism, he commented repeatedly on the use of black.
Girl and Geranium