Michael Rosenfeld Gallery is pleased to present Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved, a first-of-its-kind exhibition exploring the impact of the theories of Hungarian psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor on the art of Alfonso Ossorio (1916–1990). Fodor’s 1949 book, The Search for the Beloved: A Clinical Investigation of the Trauma of Birth and Pre-Natal Conditioning (New York: Hermitage Press, Inc, 1949) was an early contribution to the field of prenatal psychology, and while many of his theories have lost their currency, the provocative language, vivid imagery, and theories put forth in the book provided Ossorio with, in his own words, “a springboard from which to take off.”[1] From his early surrealist drawings to his celebrated mixed-media assemblages known as Congregations, the works presented in Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved reveal Ossorio’s enduring exploration of themes addressed in Fodor’s book, notably birth, death, suffering, and sex.
In The Search for the Beloved, Fodor argues that prenatal experience and the inherently traumatic upheaval of birth form the foundation of each person’s psyche, instilling in them an innate fear of death and a lifelong, subconscious desire to return to the womb. In the book’s introduction, Fodor writes: “After nine months of peaceful development, the human child is forced into a strange world by cataclysmic muscular convulsions which, like an earthquake, shake its abode to the very foundations. … In its shattering effect, birth can only be paralleled by death.”[2]
Born in Beregszász, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Berehove, Ukraine) to a Jewish family in 1895, Nandor Fodor completed a doctorate in law at the Royal Hungarian University of Science in Budapest. After moving to London in 1929 to work as a journalist, Fodor became interested in the work of Sigmund Freud and began publishing his own writing in psychoanalytic journals. By 1949, when he published The Searched for the Beloved, Fodor had developed a reputation as a compelling psychoanalytic thinker writing for a popular audience. Many chapters of The Searched for the Beloved were first published in scientific journals, including The Psychiatric Quarterly, The American Journal of Psychotherapy, and The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Although it is unlikely that Fodor ever met Ossorio, his theories had an indelible influence on the artist, who was a voracious reader on a wide range of subjects; notably, Ossorio kept an annotated copy of The Search for the Beloved on his bedside table until the end of his life.
Alfonso Ossorio was born in Manila, the Philippines, in 1916 and raised in a devoutly Catholic family. After attending Catholic boarding schools in England and a Jesuit secondary school in the United States, he attended Harvard University, where he completed his senior thesis titled Spiritual Influences on the Visual Image of Christ. Throughout his youth, Ossorio’s irrepressible feelings of same-sex attraction were in conflict with the worldview of his upbringing and the beliefs that had been ingrained in him, leading to immense inner turmoil that he expressed through vividly detailed surrealistic depictions of biblical subjects during the early 1940s. An exemplary selection of these early works will be on view in Alfonso Ossorio & Nandor Fodor: The Search for the Beloved. Executed before the publication of The Search for the Beloved, these early drawings such as Job (1941) and The New Pandora (1944) reveal Ossorio’s lifelong interests in the themes of suffering, birth, and sex that would resonate with Fodor’s book.