The Parrish Museum, in conjunction with Washington’s Phillips Collection, have focused on American abstract expressionism to reveal a little-known but captivating story that focuses on the relationship among three of the movement’s seminal players: American painter Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), American artist and patron Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990), and French painter Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985). Featuring 55 paintings and works on paper from 1945 to 1958, the exhibition illuminates a key moment in postwar art. It reunites a number of works by Pollock and Dubuffet from Ossorio’s collection for the first time since they were dispersed after his death in 1990. artes fine arts magazine

On display in the Parrish’s new, contemporary Water Mill, L.I., N.Y. location,Angels, Demons, and Savages highlights visual affinities between the artists’ work, tracing the impact of Dubuffet’s art brut (art by the mentally ill and other so-called outsiders), the experimental spirit of Pollock’s technique, and Ossorio’s figurative language. As the focal point of the art world shifted from Europe to America, the exchange among the three helped bridge the widening gap between the continents. The exhibition deals with the four year period from 1948 to 1952, when the lives of these three artists intersected.

Alfonso Ossorio, the central figure of the story, is virtually absent from standard art history texts, his altruism and generosity having obscured his accomplishments as an artist. Ossorio was attracted early on to the work of both Jackson Pollock and Jean Dubuffet and developed collegial friendships with both artists. Ossorio met Pollock in 1949 through the art dealer Betty Parsons. In 1950, at Pollock’s suggestion, Ossorio traveled to Paris to meet Dubuffet, an artist with whom he developed a deep kinship and engaged in a rich correspondence. From 1952 to 1962, Ossorio housed and exhibited at his East Hampton estate Dubuffet’s art brut collection. Ossorio amassed hundreds of works by Pollock and Dubuffet, including one of Pollock’s most celebrated paintings, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist).

Jackson Pollock, Alfonso Ossorio, and Jean Dubuffet were among a group of artists in the mid-1950s who sought a different pictorial language through innovative use of materials and techniques. While each was classically trained, all three moved away from traditional painting methods that involved the application of paint using a brush to a canvas placed upright on an easel. Instead, these three artists developed techniques such as dripping, pouring, rubbing, and throwing their media onto paper, canvas, and hardboard panels placed on horizontal surfaces.

The physicality of this ‘action painting’ genre was being characterized by critics at the time as uniquely post-war American in origin. Catalogue contributor, Klaus Ottman points out that, Thomas Hess, managing editor of ARTnews in 1950, believed that, ”[the New York School] had replaced the School of Paris as the vital center of international avant-garde art, concluding that Paris had declined to the provincial and retarded…that is, Paris had become merely French; New York replacing Paris as the center of Paris art.” And Harold Rosenberg, outspoken proponent of American ‘action painting’ writes, “Europe no longer has anything to offer but a mixture of memories,” considering Abstract Expressionism, “the most vigorous and original movement in art in the history of this nation.”

Contrary to popular belief that Pollock was a solitary genius, the artist—whom Life magazine posed as the “greatest living painter in the United States” in 1948—was keenly aware of what other artists were doing and was influenced by those he befriended and worked with throughout his abbreviated career. In 1950 and 1951, Pollock worked at times in Ossorio’s studio in New York surrounded by Ossorio’s paintings. It was at this time that Pollock abandoned his iconic abstract designs and produced the Black Pourings, a series of figurative “drawings” created on unprimed cotton duck using mostly black industrial paint. A memorable moment in the relationship between Pollock and Ossorio provides the impetus for the production of a number of Pollock’s black-and-white paintings appearing in this exhibit. Ossorio recalls one cold Thanksgiving weekend night in the Hamptons, when Pollock returned from his studio, chilled to the bone. He immediately poured himself a tumbler of bourbon. ‘Then the drank it down and Lee [Krasner] went white in the face. It was the first drink Pollock had taken in two years. During the time he wasn’t drinking, he did his classic paintings. It is curious that he did his most abstract and highly distilled paintings when he was not drinking. The minute he resumed he went into the black and white images filled with figurative, very human elements.”

A disastrous showing several days later at a New York gallery, where his drip paintings were listed at a mere $1200, only aroused mild public interest and the contempt of critics. Soon after, sculptor Tony Smith provided Pollock with a sheaf of rice paper and black ink. This began his experimentation leading to the 1951 Black Pourings series of 1951. By the following spring, he had graduated to rolls of unprimed cotton duck, dripping think black enamel in a nearly continuous pattern along the length of the fabric, using—as Lee Krasner later recalled—glass basting syringes” like a giant fountain pen. Later cutting, editing and signing of the work determined orientation of the image. Ossorio later wrote that he felt these painting marked a “rupture with traditional compositional devices that produces, momentarily, the sense that the picture could be continues indefinitely in any direction.”

Heir to a vast Philippine sugar fortune, Alfonso Ossorio lived for most of his creative life in East Hampton, New York. Born in the Philippines to a Spanish father and Chinese-Filipino mother, he was educated in England and the United States. Upon meeting Betty Parsons in 1941, he started to exhibit regularly, at first in New York, and later in Paris with Dubuffet’s help. Among his highly original works are the Victorias Drawings (using the wax-resist method of drawing with candle stubs or liquid wax on paper then applying washes of watercolor) and his Congregations series (found-object assemblages including shells, horns, driftwood, glass eyes, and other materials).

Jean Dubuffet studied painting at the Académie Julian in 1918 but abandoned it in 1923 to take over his father’s wine-selling business. He later briefly resumed painting, but did not devote himself entirely to art until 1942 at age 41, when he rapidly became one of the most talked-about artists of his time with his radically anti-cultural position. He championed the “raw” style of outsider art created in the streets and in mental hospitals (which he called art brut) and turned to highly unconventional materials.

Dubuffet had a reputation is Paris as a madman. By the time of his exhibition at Galerie René Drouin in Paris in 1946, where he first showed his Hautes Pâtes (Matter paintings), he was violently attacked by French critics and curators. These highly textured paintings in dark, earthy palettes lacking any academic finesse were built out from layers of a mortar-like mixture of paint, sand and gravel that produced visible cracks, revealing laces, shards, chips, and pebbles beneath the surface. Referring to Jules Romaine’s popular 1923 spoof on the arrogance of the medical profession, Knock, Le Triomphe de la médicine, René Huyghe, chief curator of painting at the Louvre, pronounced, “We still lacked the Dr. Knock of painting. Now we have him.

”While remaining a highly controversial figure in Paris, he became the most prominent French artist in New York during the 1950s, with the American abstract expressionists embracing Dubuffet as one of their own. Another critic announced that Dubuffet had, “neither imagination nor genius.” To which Dubuffet defiantly replied, “I would rather that my pictures amused and interested the man on the street when he leaves his work, not the art-struck, the in-people, those who have no particular instruction or prosperity. It’s the man in the street that I’m after, personally, he’s the one I feel akin to, he’s the one I want to be friends with and confide in and collude with, and he’s the one I’d like to delight and enchant with my works.”

More contemporary critical accounts seem to have come to terms with Dubuffet’s unique style of working, as time and popular tastes have made way for outsider art as a legitimate part of the post-war, contemporary art scene. Critic Alan Weiss notes, “no artist has been more concerned, indeed obsessed, with the pure state of matter and the earth—as well as their aesthetic anti anti-aesthetic transformations—as Jean Dubuffet. The philosopher Gilles Delouse has compared Dubuffet’s technique of ripping through the surface of his paintings with blunt tools, often exposing the underlying ground, to Seurat’s definition of painting as “the art of ploughing a surface. It is a promotion of the ground…one no longer paints ‘on’ but ‘under.’

By 1953-54, Dubuffet’s days as an “esthetic terrorist” were waning. International exhibitions of his work would place him in the ranks of the Old Masters. While Ossorio had collected and hung large numbers of Dubuffet’s work in his large Long Island home, but the ‘art brut’ style did liitle to excite his many notable visitors from the worlds of art and criticism. Ossorino later wrote to Dubuffet complaining that, “No one really cared…there was no showing of great enthusiasm. [Clyfford] Still couldn’t have cared less. Perhaps Barnett Newman…who had a wider range of interests [did].” Ironically, Ossorio’s own large-scale canvases, with their flat surfaces and hard-edged shapes, elicited the term Abstract Expressionism when describing them, even though it didn’t suit the work. But, in spite of this misplaced recognition, Ossorio wrote to Dubuffet, “There is little news of the art world I can give you. One thing that is happening is a violent reaction against ‘abstract painting’—the good and the bad lumped together and condemned for the wrong reasons…Jackson Pollock is still here in the Springs [L.I.], but I see little of him.”

But, for a brief period, Pollock, Ossorio, and Dubuffet found a deep and abiding connection, with an innovative pictorial language the result. Angels, Demons, and Savages successfully unravels the nuanced transcontinental dialogue between these three artists, one infused with artistic camaraderie and mutual admiration.

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollock, Ossorio, Dubuffet, will be on view at the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, L.I., N.Y. until October 27, 2013.

Visit the Parrish Museum site at: www.parrishart.org