Art

...The point where nature and society interact with each other in the most seemingly pedestrian of ways fascinated him, and in his best paintings he continually returns to this point, developing it rather than pursuing more overtly dramatic subjects...

...EARLY nineteenth century, region has been an important force in American painting...

...T Option for the Poor: A Hundred Years of Vatican Social Teaching, Donal Dorr...

...Father Tillard, a distinguished French Canadian theologian who has long been involved in significant ecumenical work at the international level, is courageously but respectfully honest in analyzing the question of authority in the church which, in his judgment, is the great obstacle to Christian unity...

...Their point in painting and repainting a region was to gain the freedom to generalize about it...

...Art DAZZLING ORDINARY FAIRFIELD PORTER S INCE THE...

...Tillard, O.P...

...From the yellow-green of the foreground lawn, we are moved to the dark-green shadow cast 24 February 1984:117 by the house to another yellow-green patch, and from there to a dark-blue expanse of ocean and lighter-blue expanse of sky...

...More specifically, he would give greater authority to national and regional bishops' conferences and to the Synod of Bishops...

...Nonetheless each balances the other out, and in the end the painting slowly succeeds...

...He has not, in the fashion of an Andrew Wyeth, endeared himself to the public...

...They are rendered without great detail (the boat has the look of a child's toy...

...We are also seeing what is lost when Porter is characterized as the painter of the upper middle class, namely, his passionate belief in the accessibility of beauty...

...Their influence on him was minimal, but that of French artist Edouard Vuillard was enormous, and a year after seeing a Vuillard exhibition at the Chicago Art Institute, Porter at the age of thirty-two had his first one-man show...

...one of the dog's legs rests at an impossible angle...

...11.95, 328 pp...

...What is going on in Porter's work is political as well and, in the most concrete ways, egalitarian in its implications...

...Of the more than 140 paintings that constitute the Boston Museum of Fine Arts 1983 Fairfield Porter retrospective, all but a handful center on Southampton or Great Spruce Head Island, Maine...

...Solidarity: Poland 1980-1981, Alain Touraine, Fran~:ois Dubet, Michel Wieviorka, and Jan Strzelecki...

...The Northeast Atlantic Coast is where he lived and liked to paint, but he never dreamed of i suggesting that his Southampton or Maine were America in microcosm...

...Dirty Harry is a law unto himself, a useful (and murderous) corrective to the ostensible impotence of civilized justice...

...They are part of a color scheme of immense subtlety, one that operates in terms of its own spatial construction and at the same time risks being overlooked by virtue of its unassertiveness...

...In Landscape with Two Parked Cars he treats two automobiles as a natural part of the country...

...After graduating from Harvard in 1928 with a degree in fine arts, he moved to New York and enrolled in the Art Students League, where his teachers were Thomas Hart Benton and Boardman Robinson...

...One result of Porter's restraint is that his realism has never commanded a wide audience...

...HI I I I I I I 1 Religious Book Week: CRITICS' CHOICES with extensive educational and pastoral G. 11"1...

...The implication of this skillful and manipulative melodrama is that the law, because of constitutional restraints, is incapable of punishing vicious criminals...

...We cannot, if we care about beauty, act like so many twentieth-century Thoreaus searching for Walden, Porter implicitly argues throughout his painting...

...The answer becomes clear when we turn to one of the most successful paintings he did during the late 1960s, Island Farmhouse...

...In this commitment to place Fairfield Porter has been equally traditional...

...For Porter, this lack of widespread popularity was never a problem...

...T his is the best post-Vatican II book in the English language on Vatican social teaching, which, for Father Dorr's purposes, includes not only papal statements but the documents of Vatican II and the Synod of Bishops in Rome and the documents issued by the Latin American bishops at Medellin and Puebla...

...Highly recommended...

...As John Updike observed in a recent essay, Porter's world seems to consist primarily of "nice people, nice places, pleasantly redolent of affection and sensitivity and, that great underwriter of both, money...

...But Porter is an exception in the way he valued place...

...In the profusion of color and light that radiates from the canvases Porter did during these years, we are not, however, simply seeing an artist who has at last come into his own...

...A competent theologian and a man of profound faith in the workings of the Holy Spirit, he deserves a serious and respectful hearing even or especially at the highest levels of the Roman Curia...

...His insistence on painting "things as they are" led him to transform whatever was around him -- whether it was the view from a screen porch, a clump of Persian rose bushes, or the breakfast dishes on an uncleared table...

...A novelist, editor, and widely published critic, Jonathan Baumbach has written on film for Partisan Review, Harper's, and other journals...

...Such a claim would have struck Porter as tendentious...

...In painting upon painting we see that from the 1960s on Porter has become a master in his use of light and color...

...But to point this out is only to describe the aesthetic consequences of Porter's achievement...

...It is interesting to see the two films in conjunction because the hero of Sudden Impact, Dirty Harry, (played by Clint Eastwood for the fourth time) behaves not so differently from the criminal protagonist of Scarface...

...It was the country as nature's nation that emerged from Cole's fiver valley and Bierstadt's mountains and Wood's fields...

...An everyday scene that was previously both charming and amateurish is suddenly transformed...

...For his regional predecessors, place was not merely subject matter they knew intimately...

...Orbis Books...

...In order to preserve civilization, policemen like Dirty Harry have to make themselves into avenging angels of the unprotected...

...This behavior seems almost reasonable within the highly charged and distorted context of the movie because the criminal suspects we meet tend to be blatantly guilty and unredeemably depraved...

...Instead, he has been seen as a stylistic conservative content to paint the private lives of the upper middle class...

...Michael Glazier, $17.95, $12.95, paper, 242 pp...

...The house, the dog, the boat, and two islands break up what would otherwise be an abstract painting, but now their presence is anything but incidental...

...All such qualifications vanish, however, the minute we change perspectives and look at Island Farmhouse as a colorist painting in which the real subject, as Porter wrote of the work of his friend Willem de Kooning, is "the nature of paint as the artist's object of contemplation...

...When viewing, leave social and political considerations at home...

...The last thing he wanted to be classified as was one of "the illustrators of the American scene...

...GEORGE G. HICK;INS is adjunct lecturer in theology at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C...

...During the 1950s Porter acquired tremendous influence as a critic for Art News, and in that same decade he began to gain a reputation as an artist's artist -- the leader of a group of painters that included Alex Katz, Robert Dash, Jane Freilicher, and Neil Welliver...

...JONATHAN BAUMBACH (Commonweal' s movie reviews are currently being written by guest critics...

...Born in Winnetka, Illinois in 1907 to wealthy parents, Porter never had to work for a living or depend on patrons to sustain his career...

...The most carefully researched and, in Commonweal: 118...

...He is ",dso very good at putting official church documents in proper historical focus and perspective...

...The ocean, a small boat, a dog, and a clapboard house are shown in perfect harmony with each other on a bright summer day...

...eorge t a l g g l n s oxp o io is constructively critical of Vatican social MSGR...

...By 1961, when he quit reviewing to give full time to his own work, Porter was firmly established in New York art circles, and from then until his death in 1975, he had fourteen one-man shows and taught at Amherst, Yale, Southampton College, and the Maryland Institute...

...We don't just think of artists such as Thomas Cole, Albert B ierstadt, and Grant Wood as American landscape painters...

...What was it that made Porter such a success within the art world but not outside it...

...Throughout his major work Porter takes every opportunity available to show that the light and color he is most dazzled by abound...

...From Porter, no such iconographic claims are forthcoming...

...From this point on, his career quietly began to build...

...We think of them as men who benefited from a sense of place, who made the Hudson Valley, the Rocky Mountains, the farm country of Iowa their subject...

...Place was America in microcosm...

...We are no longer presented with a casual seascape but a painting carefully structured around a series of monochrome expanses of color...

...We must learn to be nourished by what lies before us, by what characterizes our society's compromised relationship with nature...

...17.95,203 pp...

...Rightly seen a car need not be an intruder on the landscape any more than a water tank or a stray dog...

...It is a fantasy after all, a policier with the configurations of a western...

...The result, as Porter once said of Vuillard, is that "what he's doing seems to be ordinary, but the extraordinary is everywhere...

...Its delicacy wins out over its amateurism...

...In The Privet Hedge he allows a passing retriever to interrupt a Monet-like plane of color...

...Cambridge University Press...

...The Bishop of Rome, J.M.R...

...Dorr, an Irish missionary priest who has combined a distinguished teaching career at Maynooth College, Ireland, teaching, avoiding "sycophantic fundamentalism" on the one hand and corrosive cynicism on the other...

...The trick is to take them all in: to see with a "first timeness" of vision...

...NICOLAUS MILLS (Nicoltms Mills teaches at Sarah Lawrence and writes fiequently on art for Commonweal...

...What the Museum of Fine Arts retrospective, which in 1984 will complete its five-city tour with stops in Pittsburgh and New York, m~es clear is that the subtlety and rigor of Island Farmhouse is no accident...

...In The Harbor - Great Spruce Head he gives as much care to a water tank as the dock leading to the ocean...

...As a realistic work, Island Farmhouse is a perfect case of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts...

...Sudden Impact, which is also directed by Eastwood, disguises its inconsistencies with impressive skill, is satisfying (as vengeance f'dms tend to be) by fulfilling our most primitive feelings...

...He argues "without prevarication" that "the Roman primacy which belongs to the mystery of the church in her pilgrimage on earth and cannot be dispensed without doing violence to God's plan," can and should be exercised in a more collegial manner...