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Frederic Eugene Ossorio was born in Manila, on July 13, 1919, the younger brother of Alfonso who is better known in collectors’ circles. Alfonso would become a friend of Jackson Pollock and a member of the Abstract Expressionists. He would hold court with members of the New York’s art world at his legendary estate “The Creeks” in East Hampton. Another brother Robert would found the Manhattan Festival Ballet company. Robert Ossorio would begin life reportedly as a sickly child and would turn to dance lessons to build his body up. It would become a lifelong obsession and he would reach some success, performing in Hollywood musicals and New York ballets. He would be in the same orbit as avant-garde choreographer Merce Cunningham and would be known as an almost omnipresent behind-thescenes figure who would support ailing dancers and cultural causes discreetly. Their mother Maria Paz, “Pacita” Yangco was one of the daughters of Don Luis Ronquillo Yangco, who in his heyday was dubbed ‘The King of the Pasig River and Manila Bay”, thanks to a fleet of 148 ships, 12 Chinese junks and a steamboat that docked all over the Philippines. The pater of the family was Don Miguel Jose Ossorio whose family was also of substantial means, since he was sent to be educated in St. Edmund’s in Ware, England, the oldest Catholic school in that country and afterwards at the Christian Brothers School in Gibraltar, which educated only the children of the well-to-do. Don Miguel would wed Pacita in 1910 and appears to have struck out on his own in the shipping business, with his own freighters operating between the Philippines and the rest of the Pacific islands. He would soon find his metier, which was sugar — first establishing the North Negros Sugar Company in 1917, followed in 1919 by the Victorias Milling Corporation, both in Negros Occidental. Victorias would eventually become one of the world’s biggest sugar refineries. Not much remains on record about Pacita apart from a delicious footnote in the Rolls-Royce records of July 1934 of her purchasing an extremely rare and expensive Phantom II Continental Sedaca coupe, with the annotation, “Madame Ossorio, who maintains a residence at the prestigious Dorchester Hotel, purchased the Rolls-Royce through London agent Captain H.R. Owen and specified that her car be built “for use in the UK mainly touring at comparatively high speed.” She would, of course, need the automobile to tool around the country to visit her sons. Frederic, like all his brothers, would be sent to study in English boarding schools in Bath and Malvern; and then go on for higher education in the United States. He would earn a degree in European History at Yale University and go on to the Harvard Business School when after just one year, war would break out and he would quit to enlist. He would wind up as part of the unit celebrated in film as “The Monuments Men”, members of the U.S. army who would rescue important works of art from the Germans during and immediately after World War II. He would be credited for assisting in the recovery of Van Gogh’s Field of Poppies near Auvers-Sur-Oise, from the Lauffen Salt Mines in Austria where it was secreted along with other artistic treasures pillaged by the Nazis. The Van Gogh work is doubly significant because it is among the last that was ever painted by this artist. Frederic would return to Manila after the War to head the sugar enterprise Victorias Milling Company founded by his father. The family followed paternalistic practices and even determined that they would compensate all their workers the three years that the enterprise had stopped business during the Japanese occupation. While it is his brother Alfonso who is more famous for painting the mural of the “Angry Christ” by which title the Church of St. John the Worker has become world-renowned (thanks to coverage by Life Magazine), it was Frederic’s brainchild to actually build the church as a way of bringing the community together after the trials of the war. He selected the foreign architect, Antonin Raymond, to design it and can also be credited for its avant-garde character. He flew in his brother to create the motif for the altar; while in the sanctuary, another florid work of art, a diptych painted by Belgian ecclesiastical artist, Countess Adelaide de Bethune is to be found. Frederic would move back to the United States in the late 1960s, serving on the board of his family’s sugar corporation in the country while still maintaining close ties with the Philippines. He would also continue to pursue his abiding interest in art, collecting works not only by his brother but other significant artists of the 20th century. With his wife Siena, he would later donate various artworks in their collection to the university museums of Harvard, Vassar and Yale as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the Smithsonian Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Nobody could be as diametrically opposite to the Ossorio brothers than the artist and writer Hernando Ruiz Ocampo. Born in Sta. Cruz, Manila in 1911, he would find himself shunted off with his family to Maypajo, north of Manila, due to his father’s reversal of fortune. At the time, Maypajo was a colorful district renowned for its tulisanes (bandits) and honkytonks. At age seven as legend had it, H.R. was a working urchin on the sidewalk, offering shoeshines to the customers of the tawdry cabaret in town. He would eventually take a job as the cashier in the establishment. (The painting titled Sideshow that recently went to auction at León Gallery is a throwback to his memories of this time.) He would drop into —and out — of different colleges, eventually signing up for a writing course in 1930 with Manuel E. Arguilla, a newspaperman. It would be a serendipitous connection because Arguilla would eventually marry the not-yet-famous Lyd who would go on to found the Philippine Art Gallery (PAG) after the war. It would be the only venue for abstract art in the entire country. In the meantime, HR would find a role-model in his mentor Manuel and soon joined a group called the Veronicans which counted as members NVM Gonzalez, Francisco Arcellana (who would later become an influential art critic) and Angel de Jesus (who would become a lifelong friend and his biographer.) H.R. would evolve into a journalist, having his start as associate editor of the Herald Mid-Week Magazine before the war and also as a scriptwriter for Fernando Poe Sr. and even a director of stage shows in the Lyric, Capitol, and Avenue theaters. He would begin to attract attention by winning prizes at the annual competitions put up by the then-fledgeling Art Association of the Philippines. At the very first contest in 1948, Carlos V. Francisco would take top prize for the classic Kaingin; H.R. brought up the rear with Nude with Candle with Flower, placing 6th. There was no other way but up. By 1950 he would claim both first and second place for Arabesque and Man and Carabao, respectively — and was ready to break out of the confines of conventional painting dominated by Fernando Amorsolo. That same year, he would lead a group composed of Manansala,, Legaspi, Tabuena, Oteyza, and Estella into the fray with a first landmark exhibition at the Manila Hotel. Their co-conspirator, fellow writer, E. Aguilar Cruz, would give them the name famous till today, the Neo-Realists. The objective was to create a whole new way of looking at the world, their imaginations seared and forever changed by the desolation and trauma of World War II. Ocampo was becoming so famous that the French government offered him a grant to study art in Paris, which he declined. To his dying day, HR would steadfastly refuse to travel, although his works would travel far and wide, including the PAG’s very first New York show, the Philippine Cultural Exhibition, organized by Lyd Arguilla. He had become, after all, one of the stalwarts in that influential gallery. (In the 1960s, he would represent the Philippines at the Sao Paolo Bienal and the Festival International de la Peinture in Chateau Musee in Grimaldi, France.) The year this work was painted, 1965, HR would forge ahead in another career — establishing an artspace of his own called Gallery 7, at the Merchandise Mart in Makati. The ‘magnificent seven’ behind its name were HR, Manansala, Yonzon, Malang, Ang Kiukok, Rafael Asuncion and Ong Bungian. Its inaugural show was on April 7th of that year. They are featured in a commemorative photograph of the occasion — H.R. proudly presenting his Mutant A, his commentary on nuclear warfare. Beside him is Vicente Manansala; Ang Kiukok sits on the step in front of them; Malang is in the foreground. Gallery 7 would be the first artists collaborative gallery. This dramatic H. R. Ocampo is endowed with impeccable provenance, having been acquired by Frederick E. Ossorio (1919 - 2005) at the inaugural exhibit of HR Ocampo’s Gallery 7. He is furthermore listed in the biography, titled H.R. Ocampo : The Artist as Filipino by Angel G. de Jesus (1979) as part of the list of H.R.’s key collectors on page 204; the list was made by the artist himself and culled by De Jesus from that personal register. HR’s most authoritative biographer, De Jesus, would also record that the artist would identify the years 1964 to 1968 his Mutants Period. Given the title and date of this work, we can presume that it is among the first in this series. The entire era, according to De Jesus, was inspired by the film The Beginning of the End, which started HR “painting symbols of mutants, and fantasies of the havoc wrought by nuclear warfare.” Depicting the era called the Atomic Age, “The Beginning of the End was a sci-fi movie that involved a female reporter who would not take ‘no’ for an answer and her undercover work to expose scientific experiments that would create killer mutants. This would have resonated with H.R, in many ways, as a relentless newspaperman himself. In the work at hand, earth’s natural vista of green becomes transformed by what looks like a nuclear conflagration. Two human figures appear to have become balls of fire while volcanoes erupt behind them, rivulets of lava stream relentlessly towards the viewer. While H.R. spins this cautionary tale of science gone astray, he cannot help himself by creating a hypnotically beautiful landscape.