COMMUNITY

Alfonso Ossorio ’34 as young student

During the course of a recent committee meeting which had as its focus a discussion of the works of art displayed on campus, one participant said something to the effect of, “Wouldn’t it be great if Portsmouth had its own actual art museum?” Although two of us in the meeting were familiar with the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State’s main campus, I couldn’t think of any high schools fortunate enough to have their own art museum. A quick internet search revealed that the Norwich Free Academy, a public school in Connecticut, is home to the Slater Memorial Museum which garners excellent reviews on Tripadvisor.

The work of this month’s “Artist of the Abbey” could easily fill a small museum and, in fact, many of his works are in permanent museum collections around the world. Over the decades, many have also been included in loan exhibitions. Alfonso Angel Yangco Ossorio ’34 (1916-1990) was born in Manila to wealthy Filipino parents, prominent in the sugar industry there. His heritage was Hispanic, Filipino and Chinese and the influence of these cultures infused his style across a wide range of media throughout his life, working almost to his untimely death of a stroke at age 74 in New York City. Volumes have been written about his art and life, both by him and about him, but it will be his early formative years, shaped to a degree here at Portsmouth, upon which we shall concentrate in this limited space, as well as some of the legacy which he has left behind for us.

Former chapel of Portsmouth Priory with Ossorio crucifix

At age eight, he traveled with his mother and brothers to England where he was enrolled in Catholic boarding schools, remaining there until 1930. Returning to the United States, he was enrolled in the Portsmouth Priory School from which he graduated with the Class of 1934. In 1933, while a student at Portsmouth, he became a naturalized citizen. He continued on at Harvard University (’38) where his education was focused on art history, and it wasn’t until his year at the Rhode Island School of Design that the studio art classes there immersed him in serious artistic practice.

Early drawing of “Priory’s Windmill”

Ossorio first appeared on my radar during a June visit years ago to attend the Portsmouth Institute. Displayed in a monastery hallway, near the monks’ private oratory, was a simple yet beautiful crucifix portraying Christ the King, or Christus Rex. (See the front cover of this issue.) It reminded me of primitive folk-art style crucifixes I had seen throughout the Southwest when I lived in Santa Fe, especially 2-dimnsional examples with naïve painting on a flat wooden surface. I was told that the monastery’s crucifix had been made by a talented Portsmouth student in 1934 and first used over the altar in the priory chapel before the construction of the present Abbey church in 1960. During renovations made to the monastery in 2021, the crucifix and other artworks in the hallway were put into storage, but today it graces a chapel altar in the church’s upstairs gallery.

St. Gregory the Great

Another intriguing work, painted on “All Pure Linen Hand Made Paper” and mounted on 22” x 27” board from the Royal Watercolour Society, until recently hung in the Cortazzo Administration Building. It was referenced in a talk which Fr. Damian Kearney OSB ‘45 presented to the school on October 19, 2000, when he spoke of Portsmouth oblate Ade Bethune, who taught arts and crafts here in the 1930’s and 40’s. Ossorio may have encountered her on post-graduate visits to the Priory. In addition to, “the crucifix which hung in the old chapel,” he “painted…an impressive ikon of Gregory the Great, in honor of the patron of the School,” Dom Damian noted. When I dismantled the ikon’s frame for much-needed cleaning and repair, a very small ‘A’ within an ‘O’ along with “39” became visible at the center bottom of what looked to me to be a work by a visionary mystic or an ‘outsider’ artist. It was at that point I realized it was an original Ossorio. The date places it as being done during his studies at RISD. The imagery is mystical and the technique sublime, done in what may be one of his favored media at the time: gouache. Above Pope St. Gregory’s head appears a stylized bird descending in a blaze of flames. Were the bird ascending it might be seen as a phoenix, but in its descending posture represents the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. The same image appears in a contemporaneous painting, possibly titled The Baptism of Jesus (1935?), in which the dove figures front and center. In Noah and the Dove from 1939 in gouache on board, an actual dove (but not the Holy Spirit dove) seemingly overpowers Noah in his tiny boat, the bird delivering an oversized branch in its beak.

Tree of Crosses (School library stairs)

Records indicate that Portsmouth has in the neighborhood of 46 original works by Ossorio divided among the Art Center, various school and monastery offices, the St. Thomas More Library, the Commons of the new Science Building, the Stillman Dining Hall, etc. As reported in a cover story in the P.A.S. Winter Bulletin magazine of Winter 2006, the Ossorio Foundation named the school in 2003 the beneficiary of “a portion of the art collection and artworks of Alfonso Ossorio ’34…a leading figure in the artistic world of the twentieth century.” A concerted effort is being made to inventory and update their present locations and to determine priorities for conservation and cleaning. Although many pieces are not currently available for public view, these three in particular are readily accessible (included in this article):