Fairfield Porter is one of America’s best loved painters, working in a stylized realism in a period when abstraction dominated painting.  He led an almost equally esteemed contemporaneous career as a critic, expressing himself in clear and attentive terms that mirrored the clarity of observation evident in his paintings.  Porter’s use of flat zones of carefully modulated color played a critical role in the return of figuration to painting in the later part of the 20th century, setting off new territory for a generation of realist artists from Alex Katz to Philip Pearlstein.