Jed Perl in The New Republic:
Nobody knows painting better than painters. So it’s not surprising that they produce some of the finest writing on the subject. But much of this writing remains scattered–in back issues of magazines or in letters and journals that rarely if ever see the light of day. When such work gets into print there’s cause for celebration. And that’s true right now. For new collections of writing by two important twentieth-century American painters, Fairfield Porter and Myron Stout, have just appeared.
Material Witness: The Selected Letters of Fairfield Porter and Selections from the Journals of Myron Stout are terrific books. They’re suffused with the questing, restless, daring intellectual rhythms of a painter’s life.
More here.