Fairfield Porter, Still Life with Boats, 1968.
“One reason I never became an abstract painter is that I used to see Clement Greenberg regularly, and we always disagreed…. He said to de Kooning, ‘You can’t paint figuratively today.’ And I thought: If that’s what he says, I think I will do exactly what he says I can’t do. That’s all I will do. I might have become an abstract painter except for that. Another reason I paint the way I do is that in 1938 at the Art Institute in Chicago there was an exhibition of Vuillard and Bonnard. I looked at the Vuillards and thought that maybe they were just a revelation of the obvious, and why did one think of doing anything else when it was so natural to do that.”
—quoted in Fairfield Porter: Realist Painter in an Age of Abstraction, 1982
