{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":58490,"auction_id":121,"set_id":155,"lot_number":"122","artist":"Alfonso Ossorio (1916 - 1990)","title":"Orchid and Egg","starting_price":1200000,"signed_dated":"signed, dated 1942, and inscribed
\n\"29 - XII - 42 / NYC\" (lower left)","medium":"watercolor on paper","size":"18 1/4\" x 11\" (46 cm x 28 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":"Wakefield Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by Alfonso Ossorio (Second One-Man Exhibition), New York, 23 February - 9 March 1943","literature":null,"write_up":"The Introspections of the Young Alfonso Ossorio Musings and Struggles on Identity, Religion, and Self-Acceptance\nby ADRIAN MARANAN
Orchid and Egg formed part of Alfonso Ossorio's second solo exhibition that he mounted at the Wakefield Gallery in New York City in early 1943. Wakefield Gallery was then managed by Betty Parsons, who founded it in 1940 in the basement of Wakefield Bookshop, located at 64 East 55th Street. Parsons would become Ossorio's first gallerist, and she would later become an influential matriarch of the American abstract expressionist movement by promoting the works of the then-unknown\nOssorio, Pollock, and Rothko, among others, who all had their first shows under Parsons.
The March 1, 1943 issue of The Art Digest, one of the leading American art magazines of the 20th century, praised Ossorio's works in the exhibition, writing:
\"Alfonso Ossorio, Spaniard from the Philippines with a Harvard training, now exhibiting at the Wakefield Galleries until Mar. 9, has a surprising coincidence of qualities which makes his show an interesting affair. He retains a Dürer quality in his draughtsmanship, while wandering off into strange imaginal realms—a combination of the old and the newest of the new.”
The review continues, \"Anatomical and cadaverous detail clothed in glowing and jeweled color gives way in most cases to extremely well-drawn portraits, still retaining an introspective quality carried over from the surrealistic preludes.\"
Ossorio’s introspection in his early works
The review particularly highlighted the \"introspective quality\" of Ossorio's works, and it is not surprising that he carried over elements of his personal life into his works. By the time Ossorio painted Orchid and Egg, Ossorio had undergone a pivotal event in his life: his marriage and divorce to a Spanish-Irish woman by the name of Bridget Hubrecht.
Ossorio's marriage to Hubrecht was a complicated one. A divorcee, Hubrecht was a refugee who arrived in the US after World War II had struck Europe. Ossorio met Hubrecht in the spring of 1940, and the two immediately eloped to New Mexico that summer.
Torn between marriage and his own sexuality
Ossorio and Hubrecht married in early 1941, but their marriage would soon prove to be a short-lived one as they would divorce just over a year later. Some critics, specifically Klaus Ottmann in his essay This is the Glory: Alfonso Ossorio's Artistic Treatment, point out that Ossorio's marriage to a divorcee was \"against the will of his family.\" Some others particularly lean on the belief that Ossorio merely married Hubrecht just to conceal his homosexuality, as he was forced by his father, Don Miguel. This rings particularly true for a de Buena familia, whose traditions and values are deeply rooted in conservative societal norms influenced and propagated by Catholicism. As either thing can be true at the same time, what remained clear was that Ossorio was in the throes of a struggle: whether to desperately fit in to justify the expectations of both his family and society, or to uncompromisingly embrace his sexuality as an integral part of the totality of his being.
Eric Ossorio, son of Alfonso's brother Frederic, said in his recollections of the Ossorio brothers published in the catalog of the Leon Gallery exhibition \"Alfonso Ossorio: Grazing Light\": \"As unfair as it may seem today, in those days, I don't believe it was expected of a father to be present as a loving figure; Don Miguel was working. He was from a military family, and that was just the way it was.\"
Ossorio's sexual orientation saw him in conflict with his familial upbringing, so much so that when he returned to the Philippines in the early 1950s to work on the mural of the St. Joseph the Worker Church in his hometown in Victorias, he was confronted with his memories of his overbearing father, his struggle with religion and sexuality, and the painful childhood recollection of his mother, Doña Pacita, leaving him and his two brothers at an England boarding school at tender ages.
Orchid and Egg as representative of Ossorio’s psyche
In this train of thought, Orchid and Egg can be viewed as an amalgamation of Ossorio's internal conflicts of his being. As orchids are considered \"contradictory\" for their elegance and refinement, values traditionally associated with femininity, their name was literally coined from the Greek \"orchis,\" meaning testicles, inspired by the flower's underground tubers.
Set against a backdrop of an enigmatic desert, Ossorio particularly depicts in this piece the Paphiopedilum, also known as the Venus slipper orchid, native to Southeast Asia, several territories in the Pacific Islands, including New Guinea, the Indian subcontinent, and the southern part of China. It is named after the coastal city of Paphos in Cyprus, where the ancient Greeks believed Aphrodite (the god of love, lust, passion, fertility, and beauty) set foot after she emerged and was born from the sea as a ravishing woman.
Paphiopedilum is often associated with the love story of Aphrodite and the handsome mortal Adonis. One myth tells of the story of the goddess hunting with her lover\nwhen a powerful storm struck, forcing them to take refuge inside a cave, where they passionately made love. After the storm, the two left, and in a bit of a hurry, Aphrodite left one of her slippers. A human soon found the slipper, and when he was about to pick it up, it transformed into an enchanting orchid with slipper-shaped petals.
The work is seen as a symbol of Ossorio and Hubrecht's\nelopement into New Mexico, which would soon brew into a turbulent marriage. This is evident in Ossorio's choice of setting and the legend behind the orchid that the artist portrayed in this work. The backdrop is brimming with enigmatic images of white and red raindrops, evocative of seminal fluids and blood droplets —a likely allusion to the couple's tumultuous relationship, in which intimacy and indifference, passion and aggravation, all collide.
A personal renaissance
It must also be mentioned that almost a year before Ossorio painted this watercolor, he had been engaged in a road accident, being hit by a taxi on Madison Avenue near Wakefield that left him with a severely broken leg. This occurred as he was waiting for his enlistment status for the war (the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor) in an unfortunate blackout in the city.
In what seems like a renaissance of all sorts, Ossorio depicts the orchid as emerging from inside the eggshell, evoking the story of Aphrodite's birth that parallels Ossorio's recovery and willful rise from the frailty and vulnerability of it all: an escape from a marriage that he was just forced into, a deep seated childhood trauma, an unfortunate accident, and family pressures, an unfortunate accident. Personal tensions are woven, resulting in a work that reveals Ossorio defying religious expectations and resisting the macho- centered gender norms of his time. Ossorio also likely used the imagery of the orchid to associate it with himself, with its biomorphic form and outstretched arms as personifying his own character: a man can be elegant and delicate yet bold enough to be all that he can be, to pursue what his\nsoul truly craves and yearns for.
Orchid and Egg sees Ossorio coming to terms with the contradictions his sexuality had brought upon, accepting it as an integral part of his totality. Just a few years later, in 1948, Ossorio would meet ballet dancer Edward \"Ted\" Dragon while vacationing in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. The two would cohabitate the following year, forming a romantic relationship and committed partnership that lasted until Ossorio's demise in 1990.
Ossorio's early view on his sexual orientation can be seen through glimpses in his introductory note to his senior thesis, \"Spiritual Influences on the Visual Image of Christ,\" in which he wrote: \"Under what form He is thought of in the visual imagination of artists, under what material shape He is shown to His worshippers, is, to my mind, dictated mainly by the religious thought of a period: stylistic variations are governed by\nintellectual changes....\"
It can be inferred that early on, Ossorio had already viewed his sexuality through the lens of a relatively progressive notion, despite being hammered by familial and societal expectations. Like Christ's image, beliefs on and prejudices against sexuality beyond the binary are shaped by the larger context of one's milieu. For Ossorio, what was important was that his sexuality mattered to him more than it mattered to others and their biased notions, especially considering the context of his times.
\"AAO's homosexuality was less of a concern to him than some people like to emphasize,\" wrote Eric. \"I believe that ffor him, homosexuality was a choice or preference, not some deep, dark conflict that he had to reconcile. Sure, he knew it was contrary to the Church's doctrines...but he also knew that the Church's doctrines were human-made, and therefore, by definition, flawed.”","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":1800000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":1800000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":2162880,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":63744,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/122.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":64059,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/122e.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":64058,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/122d.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":64057,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/122b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":64056,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/122c.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":64053,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/122a.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[900000,1000000,1100000,1200000,1300000,1400000,1500000,1600000,1700000,1800000,1900000,2000000,2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":121,"next":123,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}