Where the Meanings Are

In the summer of 1927 three young men of means ran into a neighbor from back home in Winnetka, Illinois, on the streets of Paris, who was stranded with a penniless delegation of labor leaders and educators intended for Moscow. Fairfield Porter and his brothers agreed to wire for money to bail the men out, and soon Porter, an aspiring painter, found himself in Moscow, in a meeting with Leon Trotsky, “smooth and charming and clever,” as Porter observed, on the verge of his expulsion from the Soviet Union. Porter sketched Trotsky holding forth at a conference table, proselytizing to the American bureaucrats. The drawing is of no special distinction: it was done, like a doodle, to pass the time. But it suggests the kind of casual power that Porter threw on and off like a cotton sweater: the Harvard junior could boast that his pocket change had made a meeting of nations possible.Porter went on to become an art world insider, publishing influential reviews for years; he helped establish the early reputation of Willem de Kooning, among others. But Porter’s own paintings are outsider art: DIY worlds put together with some of the earnestness of a person very passionately embracing a hobby, ...