Category: guys

Alfonso Ossorio

Alfonso Ossorio, “Saint Martin and the Beggar”, 1940, Ink, Gouache, and Watercolor on Paper, 52 x 37 cm, Ayala Museum, Manila, Philippines

Born in August of 1916 in Manila, Alfonso Ossorio was an abstract expressionist artist of Hispanic, Filipino, and Chinese heritage. At the age of fourteen, he moved to the United States and attended Portsmouth Abbey School in Rhode Island, graduating in 1934. Ossorio studied fine art at Harvard University from 1934 to 1938, and continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. He became a United States citizen in 1933.

Discovered by art dealer and collector Betty Parsons, Alfonso Ossorio had his first show, featuring his Surrealist-influenced works at New York’s Wakefield Gallery in 1940. Following World War II service in the US Army as a medical illustrator, tasked with drawing surgical procedures on injured soldiers, he took some respite in the Berkshires, a region in western Massachusetts known for its outdoor activities. It was there at the 1948 Tanglewood Music Festival that Ossorio met Edward Dragon, a ballet dancer, who would be Ossorio’s life-long partner. 

Through his connection with Betty Parsons, Ossorio became acquainted with the work of Jackson Pollock. Becoming both an admirer and a collector of Pollock’s expressionist work, he and Pollock soon developed a close friendship and reciprocal influence on each others work. Later in 1951, through critic and art historian Michel Tapié, Ossorio established a contact between Pollock and the young Parisian gallery owner Paul Facchetti who realized Pollock’s first solo exhibition in Europe in 1952.

In Paris in 1951, Ossorio and Edward Dragon frequently met with artist Jean Dubuffet and his wife Lili. While they were visiting, Jean Dubuffet wrote the text for his monograph on Ossorio entitled, “Peintures Initiatiques d’Alfonso Ossorio” and introduced Ossorio to art critic and collector Michel Tapié. Tapié organized a one-man show at the Studio Paul Facchetti of Ossorio’s small, luminous “Victorias Drawings”, which Ossorio made while visiting the Philippines. Produced using Ossorio’s experimental drawing technique of wax-resistant crayon on Tiffany & Co. stationary, the works in this series are counted as some of Ossorio’s most innovative. 

Dubuffet’s interest in art brut opened up new vistas for Ossorio, who found release from society’s preconceptions in the previous unstudied creativity of insane asylum inmates and children. In the 1950s, Ossorio began to create works resembling Dubuffet’s assemblages. He affixed shells, bones, driftwood, nails, dolls’ eyes, cabinet knobs, dice, costume jewelry, mirror shards, and children’s toys to the panel surface. Ossorio called these assemblages congregations, with the term’s obvious religious connotation.

On the advice of Pollock, Ossorio and Edward Dragon purchased an expansive 60-acre estate, The Creeks, in East Hampton, Long Island, New York, in 1951, where they lived for more than forty years. Alfonso Ossorio died in New York City in 1990. Half his ashes were scattered at The Creeks estate and the other half came to rest nine years later at Green River Cemetery, alongside the remains of many other famous artists, writers and critics. 

Alfonso Ossorio’s works can be found at The Creeks, the Harvard Art Museum in Massachusetts, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, among others.

Second Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, “Tree”, September 1940, Ink and Graphite on Paper, 51 x 33 cm, Private Collection

Bottom Insert Image: Alfonso Ossorio, Untitled, 1941, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, Estate of the Artistjpg

Calendar: October 5

 

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of October

The Garden Brocade

October 5, 1887 was the birthdate of German painter and graphic artist Max Ackermann.

Max Ackermann studied under Henry van de Velde, one of the main founders of the Art Nouveau movement in Belgium, at his studio in Weimar and at the Deresden studio of Impressionist Gotthardt Kuehl. In 1912, at the age of twenty five, Ackermann attended the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, under an apprenticeship of Adolf Hölzel, who introduced Ackermann to non-representational painting.

In 1921, Ackermann met pioneer of abstract dance Rudolf von Laban who inspired Ackermann to try rhythmic blind paintings. Throughout the 1920s, Ackermann worked as an artist in Stuttgart and had his first show of figurative and abstract paintings, pastels, and drawings. In 1926 he spent time in Paris, where he became friends with Piet Mondrian and Adolf Loos, an Austrian architect and influential theorist of modern architecture. Ackermann met Wassily Kandinsky at this time and was encouraged in his quest for absolute painting.

Ackermann set up a training workshop for new artists in his studio and hosted seminars for young art teachers. In 1930 , he introduced a seminar on “Absolute Painting”, giving lectures in 1933 on this topic at Stuttgart’s Valentien Gallery. Ackermann was considered degenerate by the new Nazi authorities and was forbidden from exhibiting in 1933, and from teaching in 1936, both by decrees. His graphics and paintings displayed in the state gallery of Stuttgart were confiscated. Leaving Stuttgart, Ackermann continued his abstract painting at an artist colony at Hornstaad on Lake Constance near the Swiss border.

Many of Ackermann’s early works were destroyed when his studio was bombed during a Second World War air raid. After the war Ackermann had one-man shows in West German cities and collective shows in Paris and Zurich. With German composer and conductor Wolfgang Fortner, Ackermann held a seminar on music and painting in 1952. A year later he took part in an event with “organic” architect Hugo Häring and Kurt Leonhart on the subject of painting and architecture.

Max Ackermann was appointed Professor by the German Ministry of Culture in 1957; and in 1964, he was honored by the German Academy. He died in the spa town of Bad Liebenzell in the Black Forest of Germany on November 14, 1975, at the age of 88.

Paul Freeman

Paul Freeman, Titles Unknown, ( The Mechanic )

“The mechanic, when a wheel refuses to turn, never thinks of dropping on his knees and asking the assistance of some divine power. He knows there is a reason. He knows that something is too large or too small; that there is something wrong with his machine; and he goes to work and he makes it larger or smaller, here or there, until the wheel will turn.”
― Robert G. Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child

Henri Cartier-Bresson: “To Photograph is to Hold One’s Breath”

Photographers Unknown, Ten Guys and Ten Cameras

“To photograph is to hold one’s breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It’s at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

― Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye

Flowers and a Quote

Flowers and a Quote

“Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty.

Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother’s breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys—”
― Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund

Calendar: October 2

A Year: Day to Day Men: 2nd of October

Eagle Rising

October 2, 1890 marks the birthdate of actor and comedian Groucho Marx.

Groucho Marx, born Julius Henry Marx, was born in New York City. His father Samuel never had much success as a tailor, and the family struggled financially. His mother Minnie became a stage mother, guiding her children’s theatrical acts and even performing herself. The act eventually featured Groucho and his brothers Leonard, Adolph, and Milton.

Groucho Marx received his colorful nickname based on his personality from vaudeville performer Art Fisher, who also gave the brothers stage names: Leonard became ‘Chico’, Adolph became ‘Harpo’, and Milton became ‘Gummo’. Milton Marx left the act to fight in World War II and was replaced by the youngest brother Herbert, who became known as ‘Zeppo’.

By the 1920s, the Marx Brothers had become a hugely popular theatrical act. During this time, Groucho developed some of his famous trademarks; the long coat, the painted-on mustache, thick glasses, and the thick cigar. Groucho explained that the props were useful also: “if you forget a line, all you have to do is stick the cigar in your mouth and puff on it until you think of what you’ve forgotten”.

The Marx Brothers had a string of Broadway hits, starting with the 1924 “I’ll Say She Is”, which Groucho helped write. The following year, they returned to the stage with “The Cocoanuts”, a spoof on land speculation in Florida. The Marx Brothers hit it big again in 1928 with “Animal Crackers.”  Working with producer Irving Thalberg, the Marx Brothers created one of their most popular movies “A Night at the Opera”, released in 1935.

Even before the Marx Brothers split up, Groucho Marx had been exploring other career opportunities. He wrote the 1930 humorous book “Beds”, and followed it up in 1942 with “Many Happy Returns”, his comic attack on taxes. On the radio, Groucho worked on several programs before landing a hit in 1947 with “You Bet Your Life”. He hosted the quirky game show, which focused more on his quick wit than on contestants winning prizes.

Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life” moved from radio to television in 1950, and Marx entertained America with his wisecracks for 11 years, also winning an Emmy in 1951. After that program ended in 1961, he appeared on “Tell It to Groucho”, a short-lived game show the following year. After the end of that game show, Grouch Marx retreated from the limelight, making only occasional appearances on television and film.

Groucho Marx died of pneumonia in a Los Angeles hospital on August 19, 1977. The New York Times article on his passing stated: “He developed the insult into an art form. And he used the insult, delivered with maniacal glee, to shatter the egos of the pompous and to plunge his audience into helpless laughter”.