Alfonso Ossorio

Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990) is celebrated for his colorful, exuberant paintings, works on paper, and assemblages that incorporate elements of surrealism, folk art, art brut, abstract expressionism, and the baroque imagery of his Catholic upbringing. His work regularly addressed themes of birth, sex, death, and rebirth, reflecting his ambivalent relationship to Catholicism and feelings about his own sexuality. Throughout his career, Ossorio consistently synthesized these influences to create work that reflected his unique vision, producing a singular body of work within the history of post-war American art.

Born in 1916 in Manila, the Philippines, Ossorio moved to England at the age of eight with his mother and brothers. He attended Catholic boarding schools there before moving to the United States in 1930, where he continued his studies at Portsmouth Priory in Providence, Rhode Island. In 1933, Ossorio became a naturalized U.S. citizen and enrolled at Harvard University the following year. Heir to a sugar fortune, Ossorio began collecting art as an undergraduate and soon became a dedicated collector; he would continue to expand and hone his collection for the rest of his life. In 1936, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University held an exhibition of the collection he had begun to amass, which included works by Thomas Derrick, Eric Gill, Philip Hagreen, David Jones, and Denis Tegetmeier. He also cultivated a serious studio art practice in these years, illustrating the covers of two books of poetry by Arthur Rimbaud published in 1937. In 1938, he received his BA after successful completion of his senior thesis, Spiritual Influences on the Visual Image of Christ. As Harvard’s art program focused on the history of art rather than artistic practice, Ossorio took studio art classes at the Rhode Island School of Design for a year. In 1939, the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Manhattan commissioned him for a work depicting the twelve apostles of Christ. His first solo exhibition took place in 1941, at the Wakefield Gallery, a small space run by Betty Parsons in the Wakefield Bookshop on East 55th Street, New York. In 1943, he enlisted in the US Army, serving as a medical illustrator. After an honorable discharge in 1946, Ossorio settled in New York, initially living at the Chelsea Hotel. In the summer of 1948, he met Ted Dragon, who would become his lifelong partner. Ossorio first encountered the nascent abstract expressionist movement in these years; in 1949 he purchased his first painting by Jackson Pollock. Ossorio, Pollock, and Lee Krasner quickly became good friends, and Ossorio became an important early patron and champion of the couple’s work.

Ossorio’s work of the early 1940s was dominated by still lifes, landscapes, and portraits executed with haunting detail and an unnerving precision of line in a visual style that the artist described as “a kind of super-realism.”[1] In the late 1940s, he began to explore abstraction, forming vital friendships with New York School artists such as Pollock and Krasner, as well as art brut painter Jean Dubuffet, whose work he also collected. Despite their disparate styles and concerns, Pollock and Dubuffet each inspired Ossorio to reach inward for inspiration, rather than starting with an object or scene external to himself. Ossorio’s detailed surrealistic art evolved toward a more abstract and overtly expressionistic approach, while his subject matter began to address “problems which religion covers, such as birth, sex, death”.[2] His growing interest in abstraction also coincided with his discovery of psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor’s The Search for the Beloved—A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning, a pseudoscientific text that theorized a pregnant mother could telepathically influence the mind and body of her unborn child; the artist was especially interested in Fodor’s description of human gestation and birth as violent, traumatic processes.

In 1950, Ossorio traveled to Victorias, Negros—his first time returning to the Philippines since he was ten years old. The return to his childhood homeland opened old wounds from his youth, calling up memories of racial discrimination, conflict about his sexuality, and his devoutly Catholic upbringing. The artist spent ten months in the small mill town painting a mural for the Chapel of St. Joseph the Worker titled The Angry Christ. While in Victorias, Ossorio produced some of his most important works, using wax resist on paper, which addressed the subjects of childhood, birth, sexuality, mythology, and religion. Notable for their hot, intensely saturated colors, pierced or jagged formal characteristics and pulsating energy, the series was exhibited at Studio Paul Facchetti Paris the following year after Dubuffet introduced Ossorio to eminent critic and curator Michel Tapié.[3]

Ossorio spent much of 1951 in Paris with Dubuffet, who was writing a monograph on the artist titled Peintures intiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio. He returned to the United States in August and purchased the East Hampton estate known as the Creeks, an Italianate mansion that he transformed into “the Eighth Wonder of the Horticultural World.” He also agreed to house the entire collection of the Compagnie de l’Art Brut that Dubuffet had assembled; the collection would remain at the Creeks until 1962. Throughout the 1950s, Ossorio was a vital force within the abstract expressionist movement in both artistic and curatorial capacities. He wrote the introduction for the exhibition catalogue accompanying Pollock’s “black and white” show at Betty Parsons Gallery in 1951, and from 1956 to 1958 he organized a series of exhibitions for Executive House, New York, which featured work by Pollock, Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko and David Smith, among others. From 1957 through 1961 Ossorio ran the Signa Gallery in East Hampton along with Elisabeth Parker and John Little, where they mounted a series of summer exhibitions and symposia.

In the early 1960s, Ossorio began to create the visionary assemblages that became his most well-known body of work. He referred to the works as “congregations,” as he explained to art historian Forrest Selvig in 1968: “I have taken to calling them congregations simply because they all work together and the parts are unified to a final end, working for one final effect.”[4] While the title is clearly replete with religious associations resonant with the artist’s lifelong fascination with Christianity, the artist also preferred the term for its vernacular connotations of collectivity and spiritual harmony. Bounded by deep wooden frames, Ossorio’s Congregation’s bring together a vast array of found objects including glass eyes, shells, shards, pearls, feathers, and driftwood, often synthesizing beauty with decay and refinement with crudeness, effectively reanimating—or even resurrecting—castoff objects as a precious, vivid artwork. Like their parochial counterpart, Ossorio’s Congregations are simultaneously unified and atomized; as art historian Kent Minturn has explained, “Ossorio’s mode of presentation is ‘everything all at once.’”[5]

Paradoxically, however, it is impossible for the viewer to perceive them in one fell swoop, to see a work entirely in one single glance. Each time the viewer confronts a Congregation and tries to unravel its meaning, the work tells a new story.”[6] Resisting immediate and complete apprehension, Ossorio’s work demands time and attention from its viewers. In return, the Congregations enthrall and entrance, they pulse with energy, oscillating between the material and the transcendental, and providing a unique experience with every viewing.

Beginning in the early 1960s, Ossorio exhibited his work regularly in the U.S. and abroad until his death in 1990. Notable exhibitions include Documenta III in Kassel, Germany (1964); Contemporary American Sculpture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1966); Dada, Surrealism, and their Heritage, a traveling exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1968); 30 Years of American Art at the Whitney Museum (1977); and Alfonso Ossorio 1940-1980 at the Guild Hall Museum in East Hampton (1980). In 1989, the French art collector Daniel Cordier donated nine Ossorio works to the Centre Pompidou in Paris and, in 1994, the Ossorio Foundation was opened in Southampton. Ossorio’s work has consistently been exhibited since his death in 1990, with notable solo exhibitions including a 1997 installation of the Congregations curated by Klaus Kertess for the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York; ROAD: Alfonso Ossorio’s Response to Jackson Pollock’s Death at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton in 2001 and, the following year, an exhibition of his ballet and costume designs at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, MS. In 2018, the Ayala Museum in Makati City, Philippines presented Alfonso Ossorio: A Survey, 1940-1989, the first solo museum exhibition devoted to Ossorio in the nation’s history. Since 1989, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery has organized eleven solo exhibitions of Ossorio’s work with the support and assistance of the artist’s immediate family and the Ossorio Foundation. In 2016, the gallery mounted the Alfonso Ossorio Congregations, 1959-1969: A Centennial Celebration, celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Ossorio’s work has also been posthumously featured in numerous group exhibitions worldwide, notably Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which traveled to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain and the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland (1992); Shaping a Generation: The Art and Artists of Betty Parsons at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, NY (1999); Postmodern Transgressions: Artists Working Beyond the Frame at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT (1999); Surrealism USA at the National Academy Museum in New York, which traveled to the Phoenix Art Museum (2005); Repartir à Zéro, 1945-1949 (Starting from Scratch) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon in France (2008); Asian/American/Modern Art: Shifting Currents, 1900-1970 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, CA (2008); Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, and Dubuffet at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC (2013); Drawing Surrealism at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which traveled to The Morgan Library & Museum in New York (2013); America is Hard to See at the Whitney Museum in New York (2015); Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945-1965 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, Germany (2016); Epic Abstraction: Pollock to Herrera at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2018); and the 2019 Singapore Biennale at Singapore Art Museum.

Since 2020, his work has been featured in Degree Zero: Drawing at Midcentury at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2020); Surrealism in American Art at Centre de la Vielle Charité in Marseille, France (2021); United States of Abstraction: American Artists in France, 1946-1964 at Musée d’Arts de Nantes, France, which traveled to Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France (2021); Collection 1940s-1970s, in the spotlight installation “Divided States of America” at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Myth Makers—Spectrosynthesis III, organized by the Sunpride Foundation, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2023); and Pour, Tear, Carve: Material Possibilities in the Collection, The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Ossorio’s legacy has been remembered in other ways as well. In 2023, artist and musician Mark Golamco premiered The Ghost of Ted Dragon, at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, a cabaret-style play about the forty-eight year love story between Ossorio and ballet dancer Ted Dragon.

Alfonso Ossorio’s work is in museum collections worldwide including the Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC; Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; The Alternative Museum, New York, NY; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Ateneo de Manila University Art Gallery, Quezon City, The Philippines; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Boymans-Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, Holland; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; The Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT; Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Colby College Museum of Art, Colby College, Waterville, ME; The Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC; The Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, OH; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Finch College Museum of Art, New York, NY; Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; Grey Art Gallery, New York University, New York, NY; Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY; Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Heckscher Museum, Huntington, NY; Hillwood Art Museum, Long Island University, Southampton College, NY; Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, HI; Housatonic Museum of Art, Housatonic Community College, Bridgeport, CT; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; International Center of Aesthetic Research, Turin, Italy; Kislak Center for Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA; Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL; L’Art Brut Museum, Lausanne, Switzerland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Munich Modern Art Museum, Munich, Germany; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland; The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan; New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, FL; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT.

Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC represented the Ossorio Foundation from 1996 to 2007.

[1] Alfonso Ossorio, Oral history interview with Alfonso Ossorio, 1968 November 19, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_212466

[2] Alfonso Ossorio, Oral history, Archives of American Art

[3] Francis V. O’Connor, “Alfonso Ossorio’s Expressionist Paintings on Paper,” Alfonso Ossorio: The Child Returns, 1950-Philippines exh. cat. (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, 1998), 5-14

[4] Ossorio, Oral history interview, accessed September 2016

[5] Kent Minturn, "On Jean Dubuffet’s Peintures intiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio (1951)," Alfonso Ossorio: Blood Lines, 1949-1953 exh. cat. (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, 2013), 10-24

[6] Kent Minturn, "On Jean Dubuffet’s Peintures intiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio (1951)"