ROSENBAUM
The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ARSJackson Pollock's 'Number 7, 1952.'
Water Mill, N.Y.
And Southampton, N.Y.
In accounts of the Abstract Expressionist era, painter and assemblage-maker Alfonso Ossorio (1916-1990) is better known for throwing great parties and purchasing important works by major artists than for producing significant work of his own.
Attempting to rewrite that history is "Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet," the provocative show at the Parrish Art Museum near the Long Island communities where Ossorio, as well as Jackson Pollock, lived and worked. It positions the underrated oeuvre of the wealthy bon vivant on equal footing with works by Pollock and Jean Dubuffet, his two renowned friends, who held him in high regard as a professional colleague. What they all had in common was a penchant for experimenting with unconventional materials and techniques, and a predilection for rawness over refinement.
Alfonso Ossorio's 'Head' (1951).
Angels, Demons, And Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet
Parrish Art Museum
Through Oct. 27
"Ossorio's patronage overshadowed what we know of him as an artist," observed Klaus Ottmann, curator-at-large of Washington's Phillips Collection, where a larger version of the show opened in February. Conventional wisdom pegged Ossorio as a dilettante and Sunday painter, and an early collector of masterpieces by Pollock, Dubuffet and Clyfford Still. Five works formerly in his collection are now on display at the Parrish. They had once been ensconced at the Creeks, Ossorio's grand East Hampton estate on Georgica Pond, which he bought on Pollock's recommendation. (It is now owned by the billionaire Ronald Perelman.)
Grappling with the question of why "his artistic career [was] so thoroughly marginalized," Phillips Collection director Dorothy Kosinski wrote in her catalog preface for the show (which she co-curated with Mr. Ottmann) that Ossorio "was perhaps too difficult to categorize" both personally (Philippines-born, naturalized American of mixed ethnic heritage, observant Catholic, gay) and professionally (diverse techniques, styles and media).
Pollock and Ossorio first met in 1949 through dealer Betty Parsons, who exhibited both. Pollock suggested that his new friend visit Dubuffet in France, which Ossorio did later that year and again in 1951. Although interested in each other's work, Pollock and Dubuffet never managed to meet.
The best evidence that Ossorio was no Sunday painter is his feverish burst of productivity in 1950, during a sojourn in the Philippines—his first time back since being sent away as a child to receive a British and U.S. education.
He had returned to design the interior of the chapel of St. John the Worker, being constructed for employees of his family's sugar factory, the source of his substantial wealth. While creating the chapel's monumental, fiery-hued mural depicting the Last Judgment, Ossorio also produced hundreds of his most riveting, idiosyncratic works—the so-called Victorias Drawings (actually, watercolors), named after a mill town on the island of Negros where the chapel was located. What is thought to be the first Victorias image is tellingly titled "The Child Returns."
These small, vibrant works on paper, swirling with lush reds, oranges and greens, are anomalous among the pieces in the show, including the other Ossorios. With their tropical palette and haunting treatment of religion and family, they convey the disturbing emotions unleashed by the artist's bittersweet homecoming. In the first page of his Philippines diary, he described his "lonely" childhood and sense of being "never at home in any conventional category."
Even the technique used to create these distinctive works was a departure for Ossorio. Inspired by the Surrealist Victor Brauner, he employed the wax-resist painting method in his Victorias works: With a candle or hot wax, he drew on a paper sheet that he first coated with watercolor. He then applied another layer of paint, which would not adhere to the waxed areas. Next, he drew with black ink over the waxed and painted surface, adding virtuosic, delicately rendered details to the layered image. On some of these works, he also cut or tore the paper support, creating shaped borders or lacy interiors.
The wall devoted to eight examples of this rarely seen "fracas of forms" (as Dubuffet described them in an admiring 1951 catalog essay, reproduced in the Parrish exhibition's catalog) is itself worth the visit to the museum. If, like me, you find yourself yearning for more, there's a plentiful stash in storage drawers at the nearby Southampton warehouse occupied by the Ossorio Foundation, which is still seeking homes for some 550 works remaining in his estate. It is open year-round to the public by emailed appointment.
Did Ossorio have any effect on his colleagues' work, beyond his financial patronage? Pollock's transition from his celebrated, mural-size poured paintings to more overtly figurative drawings in black industrial paint may have been inspired by Ossorio's works in his Manhattan studio, where Pollock resided while his friend was abroad.
One of those semifigurative Pollocks, "Number 7, 1952," lent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a highlight of the Parrish show. With an elegance reminiscent of old-master drawings, this abstracted but recognizable head, delineated in black and enlivened by yellow splotches, hangs next to Ossorio's Abstract Expressionist-influenced "Head" (1951). Overworked and overwrought, the Ossorio suffers by comparison to Pollock's confident expressiveness.
The catalog suggests that Dubuffet's experimental collages (not in the show) that incorporated butterfly wings may be indebted to a butterfly-shaped Victorias drawing sent to him by Ossorio, who frequently depicted children with angellike wings. The juxtaposition of Ossorio's impenetrably scrawled and slathered "Martyrs and Spectators" (1951) with Dubuffet's mud-hued, grotesquely broad-bodied, tiny-headed woman—a 1950 work from his well-known "Corps de Dame" series—exemplifies the predilection of all three artists for dense compositions in which the deployment of materials is as much the subject as what they depict.
Notwithstanding his sophistication and erudition, Ossorio was at his best when creating works that come across as outsider art. Like the intimate Victorias Drawings, some of the monumental Congregations, from the 1960s, are irregularly shaped and refreshingly oddball. Although not in the Parrish show, which chiefly focuses on works from 1948-52, the Congregations can be seen by appointment at the Ossorio Foundation. Encrusted with jewellike baubles and punctuated by glaring glass eyes and phallic protrusions mounted on panel, they are both fanciful and menacing.
Finally given a bit of overdue attention in the Parrish's uneven but tantalizing sampling, Ossorio now deserves a comprehensive retrospective, to be appreciated on his own terms, not upstaged by marquee names. Perhaps this "huge talent," as Ms. Kosinski describes him, may at last win due art-historical recognition.
Ms. Rosenbaum writes on art and museums for the Journal and blogs as CultureGrrl.