Alfonso Ossorio
Mother and Child, 1951, Oil and enamel paint on canvas, 116.205 x 73.025 cm, The Phillips Collection; The Dreier Fund for Acquisitions, 2008, 2008.010.0001, The Dreier Fund for Acquisitions, 2008
Misunderstanding ‘Born Again’
Commentary by Eric C. Smith
The story of Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus relies on a misunderstanding. Like the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well that follows in the next chapter of the Gospel of John, Jesus’s discussion with Nicodemus turns on wordplay and obfuscation. The Greek word anothen, used by Jesus in 3:3, can mean either ‘from above’ or ‘again’, and Nicodemus wrongly assumes that Jesus means the latter. The same misunderstanding was not possible in the Aramaic language that Jesus and Nicodemus were presumably speaking; the confusion has been artfully introduced in Greek by the Gospel writer to make a theological point.
An early Abstract Expressionist, Alfonso Ossorio was among a group of artists exploring what it might mean to make works of visual art while rejecting figurative representation. His work in Mother and Child is instructive: it suggests order emerging from an inchoate background, with patterns and shapes perceptible, but only just.
It is the title of this work as much as anything that informs its interpretation. Without being told that the painting was titled Mother and Child, it is unlikely that viewers would arrive there on their own. Ossorio, therefore, takes a familiar relationship and a common feature of Christian religious iconography and teases it apart, introducing unfamiliarity and disorientation.
So too with Jesus’s words to Nicodemus. Unless Jesus had told Nicodemus what he meant, his wordplay about being ‘born from above’ would have gone misunderstood. Some explanation is necessary to make sense of it, and most of the literal sense of the meaning resides in the explanation. In both John 3:1–15 and in Ossorio’s painting, the relationship between mothers and birth is less literal than experience and visual tradition might expect, and therefore more layered than we might have assumed.
References
Friedman, B.H. 1965. Alfonso Ossorio (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.)
Ottman, Klaus, and Dorothy Kosinski. 2013. Angels, Demons, and Savages: Pollack, Ossorio, Dubuffet (New Haven: Yale University Press)
