{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":61714,"auction_id":209,"set_id":242,"lot_number":"138","artist":"Alfonso Ossorio (1916 - 1990)","title":"Seated Male (Face in Torso)","starting_price":2400000,"signed_dated":"signed, titled, and dated 1950 (verso)","medium":"wax, watercolor, gouache, and ink","size":"26\" x 19 1/2\" (66 cm x 50 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Artist's collection
\nAcquired directly by the present owner from the Ossorio Foundation in 2016","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Entering the Private Church of Alfonso Ossorio From the Artist’s Famed Wax-Resist ‘Victorias Drawings’ by ADRIAN MARANAN

Presented in this lot is a magnificent work of art that was Alfonso Ossorio's most cherished in his lifetime. Titled Seated Male (Face in Torso), the work comes from the artist's famed wax-resist Victorias Drawings of the 1950s, which he created during his ten-month sojourn in the Philippines to work on the famous The Last Judgment mural, popularly known as The Angry Christ. The mural was for the St. Joseph the Worker Chapel, located in Victorias, Negros Occidental, inside the vast Victorias Milling Company complex, which Ossorio's father, Don Miguel, founded and steered into becoming a major power player in sugar milling and refining across Asia.

Ossorio gravitated so strongly toward this particular work from his coveted series of wax-resist creations that he prominently hung and displayed it in his and his lifelong partner Ted Dragon's bedroom at Ossorio's sprawling East Hampton estate, The Creeks. Seated Male (Face in Torso) was also one of the very few from the Victorias Drawings that Ossorio personally framed, manifesting his passionate reverence for this particular work.

Looking back at the Victorias Drawings

Coinciding with the Christmas season of 1949, Ossorio returned to the Philippines after more than 20 years of absence. His older brother, Frederic, who also supervised the construction of the Chapel of St. Joseph the Worker for the spiritual well-being of their company's laborers, had commissioned his younger sibling to paint the mural that would become The Last Judgment. By then, the Philippines had become uncharted terrain for Ossorio. He was only ten years old when he left the country for England with his mother, Doña Paz, and his brothers, Frederic and Robert. After six years in England, where he attended several Catholic boarding schools, Alfonso went to the United States, where he continued his Middle School education, finished high school at the Benedictine-run Portsmouth Priory in Rhode Island, and naturalized as an American citizen.

When Ossorio set foot in post-war Manila, painful and traumatic memories that were hovering at the edge of his consciousness were suddenly reawakened like floodgates being hastily opened. Recollections of his parents' separation shortly after the birth of their last child; his overbearing father, Don Miguel's stern approach to parenting, with him recounting in an interview with Forrest Selvig in 1968 that he was severely punished \"for cutting out pictures of paintings for my own private scrapbook\"; the internal conflicts of his soul on the seeming incompatibility of his conservative Catholic upbringing and his homosexuality (or bisexuality, as some critics pointed out); the painful childhood recollection of his mother, memory of his father forcing him to marry the Spanish Irish woman Bridget Hubrecht when he was twenty-five years of age to conceal his queerness, as some critics and writers on Ossorio had purportedly pointed out. This was a tumultous marriage that only lasted for a year.

Furthermore, images of post-war trauma and horror confronted Ossorio in the Philippines, witnessing all the mothers and children desperately begging for survival amidst the ruins and desolate landscape.

In the first page of the diary he kept during his ten-month stay at Victorias, Ossorio unraveled, in poetic style, his conflicting thoughts on his sufferings of the past and anguishes of the present.

\"childhood / as lonely as his was … that had not know[n] / the touch of a happy family life … of being / a Eurasian, deracinated / never at home in any / conventional category … of being among / the insulted and injured.\"

Ossorio worked on the mural by day. But he was always beaten by his experiences of the past, so much so that he would thoroughly work on the wax-resist drawings at night.

The Victorias Drawings became Ossorio's introspections on family, identity, sexuality, infancy and childbirth, and motherhood, among others, as he tried to understand himself amid a society, now intriguingly foreign to him, flooded with conservative ideals and still recovering from the devastation of the recent war. Away from the blinding excesses and glittering lights of New York City, Ossorio found the most perfect time to reflect and somehow reconcile with the ghosts of his miserable past.

Unraveling the work's symbolism

Ossorio's agitated soul in Philippine soil needed some validation, which he found in the writings of the Hungarian psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor, who had published a book in 1949 titled The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning. When Ossorio traveled to the Philippines, he brought with him a copy of the book, saying in a 1980 interview with Judith Wolfe that it was \"a springboard from which to take off.\"

In the book, Fodor argued that pregnancy and the subsequent birth of a child were the genesis of humanity's trauma, the causes of man's fear of death, and therefore, the unknown, as no one and nothing can truly explain what really happens after the cessation of life.

Fodor wrote, \"...the fear of death originates in the fear of birth; that the panicky journey through the uterine passage is an experience in dying; and that we are haunted more Doña Pacita, leaving him and his two brothers at English boarding school at such tender ages. There was also this enduring by the projected memory of this trial of body and soul than by the dread of future extinction.\"

In this particular work, Ossorio depicts a seated man, his face giving off a big smile, his arms flexed, and his thighs spread apart, revealing his \"well-endowed\" physique. A face is embossed on his torso, seemingly resembling the features of the mythological headless men called the Blemmyes (akephaloi, as the ancient Greek writer Herodotus called them). The Blemmyes were subjects of medieval fear, long before the advent of the Ages of Enlightenment and Exploration. They symbolized the unknown, the \"other\" beings that are to be found at the mysterious edges of the unexplored Earth.

What binds the myth of the Blemmyes and Fodor's The Search for the Beloved is the turmoil and anxiety of confronting the unfamiliar. In Ossorio's case, he confronted his homosexuality (taboo and dreaded in a conservative society) and childhood traumas in a land now alien to him, evoking that particular medieval fear of the unknown. In a country that was, for Ossorio, the \"other,\" he faced all the fears and discomfort lingering in his subconscious, once forgotten but now reawakened, within a society that he felt was most unwelcoming. More than protecting the vital internal organs, the torso in art has long been associated with both the heroic and the erotic. From it came the very seed of human existence—the baby. Therefore, it is life's dynamic force, its core. In line with Fodor's argument, from it came human suffering, which can only be ended through death. Echoing Fodor's words, \"Death means…a complete release from struggle. The wish to be dead and live in another world has a close correspondence with our organismic prenatal anticipations.\"

In Ossorio's world, death became synonymous with rebirth. His Philippine homecoming was both an inner renaissance and a personal revolution: a confrontation with his sexual identity clashing and struggling in a conservative society that has been wounded by the war (a traumatized, long-opressed society always hides behind the curtains of conservatism and the illusion of stability). To free his unbridled self and identity from the constricting womb that released him—the one that brought him into a world filled with contradictions—Ossorio confronted, reassessed, and somehow reconciled with his childhood traumas through his Victorias Drawings, which became his instruments of healing and catharsis.

It is naturally inviting to construe and understand that Seated Male is Ossorio’s poignant self-portrait. It is his own likeness visualizing the labors of his creative psyche. Pounded by the formidable contractions of his inner struggles, Ossorio buried the gashes of his past and delivered himself proudly into a new world that was for him to reclaim and redefine.

Ossorio's nephew and Frederic’s son Eric said in an interview for Leon Gallery’s 2017 exhibition Alfonso Ossorio: Grazing Light: \"[Ossorio] did not leave behind a legacy of pornographic images. He tried to reconcile for himself and others what remains the human conundrum and the irony of artistic expression: the apparent futility of existence with the reality of being and the conflicts of survival.\"

The spontaneous, bawdy style of Seated Male (Face in Torso) harks back to memories of the young Ossorio fondly cutting out and instinctively pasting pictures of paintings into his scrapbook, healing the repressed child within him. The work's symbolism of freedom and psychological release also resonates with Ossorio and his love for Ted Dragon, as emancipating the self brings a capable, mature love that is liberating, redemptive, and truly passionate. The two met in the summer of 1948 while vacationing in the Berkshires in Massachusetts; Ossorio's eyes were all on him when he spotted the ballet dancer at the Tanglewood Music Festival. Alfonso and Ted shared a romantic, committed partnership that lasted until the former died in 1990.

Ossorio’s coming to terms with his identity and his (conservative) religion was verbalized by Eric, saying “... for 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. I believe he felt that there were many paths to Heaven….”

Until his passing, Ossorio kept his annotated copy of Fodor's book on his bedside table, showing its profound influence and impact on the artist.

In between Pollock and Dubuffet

Long before the Victorias Chapel mural materialized, Ossorio had become friends with Jackson Pollock, by then America's most famous painter. Notably, Ossorio was one of Pollock's first collectors and patrons (Ossorio's first Pollock was Number 5, which he purchased at the artist's second solo show held at the Betty Parsons Gallery in January 1949). He would also acquire Pollock's 1950 work Number 1 - Lavender Mist, now in the collection of Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art. In subsequent years, when Pollock was starting to drown in depression amidst his blinding fame, Ossorio offered him 200 USD a month, even lending his New York townhouse so that his friend could see the psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Fox, to treat his alcoholism.

Prior to Ossorio's acquisition of The Creeks, Pollock and Krasner visited him and Ted in their carriage-house studio at 9 MacDougal Alley in New York's Greenwich Village. Pollock and Krasner were fascinated \"by this elegant painter-collector, the product of Benedictine training and Oriental refinement,\" as B.H. Friedman put it in his monograph on Ossorio. The couple also invited Ossorio to their home at the Springs in Long Island, New York, where he spent the entirety of his summer of 1949.

Through Pollock's invitation, Ossorio also befriended Jean Dubuffet that same year, visiting him in France shortly before Ossorio flew to the Philippines. Through Dubuffet, Ossorio became acquainted with an art movement the former pioneered called Art Brut, which means \"raw art\" in French. Art Brut has been associated with graffiti, primitive artists, and self-taught artists, with their style manifesting a raw expressiveness that transcends the boundaries of academically inclined art. Dubuffet personally described Art Brut's essence as \"the artistic process in all its purity, raw, reinvented on all its levels by the maker, starting solely from his own impulses.\"

From Dubuffet, Ossorio learned the importance of looking inward rather than outward for creative inspiration, a major factor in the introspective quality of his Victorias works. Ossorio occasionally sent Dubuffet photographs of his Victorias Drawings, and the latter immediately put his thoughts on his newfound friend's new works to paper. Dubuffet published these writings in his 1951 book Peintures Initiatiques d'Alfonso Ossorio.

Ossorio's Victorias Drawings were made possible through the repeated process of drawing figures using wax-based materials (leftover candle stubs, hot liquid wax, cold wax, crayons) on paper. Afterwards, a layer of water-based paint, such as gouache and watercolor, is applied over the work, utilizing the hydrophobic character of wax that results in freeform shapes and lines that wed the raw energy of Pollock's drip paintings combined with the primitive, graffiti style art of Dubuffet. Ossorio repeated the process until he was satisfied, then layered the composition with ink and scraped the accumulated excess wax. The overall result blends Ossorio's earlier Surreal style with his newfound Expressionist style influenced by his friendships with Pollock and Dubuffet, an incarnate energy that exudes raw expressiveness.

However, Ossorio’s wax-resist technique, with all the spontaneous shapes made possible by the tension between the layers of wax and water-based paint, made him distinct from Pollock and Dubuffet. Francis O’Connor, in his essay for the catalog of The Child Returns exhibit of Ossorio’s Victorias Drawings at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in late 1998, noting that the ‘accidental’ images formed by the wax and the wax-resist paint made Ossorio “exploit the surrealist, free associative device of psychic automatism, while achieving direct, painterly expression.” The result of this practice goes back full circle into the core principle of the Victorias Drawings: elevating the subconscious and allowing it as the driving force behind the art, in order to express the repressed.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":4000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":4000000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":25520,"reserve_price":3000000,"hammer_price":4806400,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":68610,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/138.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":68756,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/138a.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":68755,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/138b.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[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":137,"next":139,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}