Gebre Kristos Desta

Biography

In recent years a painting that had never been attributed to anyone was identified in Lawton, Oklahoma: a kerosene lamp, an Ethiopian fanos, with a faded signature in the corner, “KRISTOS 1980”. The lamp is read as an object that reminded the artist of home.

The man who signed it is credited with bringing modern art to Ethiopia.

Gebre Kristos Desta was born in 1932 in Harar, the youngest of six children. His father, Aleka Desta Nego, was a high-ranking clergyman: he served Ras Makonnen, the governor of Harar, and tutored his son Tafari, the future Emperor Haile Selassie. Under his father’s guidance the boy copied church manuscripts and decorated them with pictures, and the first art he came to know was the traditional painting of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. He completed primary school in Harar, studied at the Haile Selassie I Secondary School and graduated from the General Wingate School in Addis Ababa. His family wanted him to become an agricultural specialist, and he spent two years in the science faculty of the university in Addis Ababa. He taught himself painting from books, and in his second year he left the university to become an artist.

In 1957, at twenty-five, he won a scholarship and went to Cologne, to the school of fine arts of the Kölner Werkschulen, where he studied until 1961. He graduated top of his class and was given a studio of his own as a reward. He showed his first exhibition, a whole year’s work, at the Galerie Küppers in Cologne, and then travelled for six months around Western Europe. His compatriot, the painter Yohannes Gedamu, observed that after Cologne Gebre Kristos preferred black and grey to bright colour.

In 1962 he returned to Addis Ababa and began working in the manner of abstract expressionism. Ethiopian art at the time held to tradition, and he was reproached for abandoning familiar forms in favour of European technique. He went on working in his own way and taught painting and poetry at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa. At the same time he was among the artists patronised by Emperor Haile Selassie, who was promoting new ideas in education, art and industry. In 1965 Gebre Kristos received the Haile Selassie I Prize Trust Award for Fine Arts; the citation states that he was largely responsible for bringing non-figurative art into the country. As a representative of his country he exhibited in West Germany, Greece, Senegal, the Soviet Union, India, Yugoslavia, Brazil and Ghana. He wrote his poems in Amharic, and their unusual arrangement of lines and rhymes caused as much controversy as his abstractions; in the second half of the 1960s his reading at Addis Ababa University, together with the poets Mengistu Lemma and Tsegaye Gabre-Medhin, was received by the audience with delight.

After 1974, when the military council known as the Derg came to power, he had less and less freedom and ever more insistent demands for propaganda work. In 1978 (according to other sources, in 1979), during an exhibition trip to Kenya, he did not return home and went to Germany to seek asylum. Germany refused him. In 1980 the United States granted him asylum, and he settled in Lawton.

In Lawton he became part of the local art scene: he gave paintings to charity auctions, taught classes, showed a solo exhibition of 47 works and painted a mural at a school. Towards the end of his life he was working on a brightly coloured mural of a rising sun. How many paintings he managed to make in Lawton is hard to say: some of them, like that lamp, are only now being identified. He died in 1981, at the age of fifty; both Lawton and Oklahoma City are given as the place of his death. He is buried in Gracelawn Cemetery in Edmond, Oklahoma.

In 2009 the Gebre-Kristos Desta Modern Art Museum opened at Addis Ababa University. Thirty of his works are on permanent display there, among them “The Crucifix”, painted in harsh red lines. March has been declared Gebre Kristos Desta Month, and an annual poetry festival in Ethiopia and the United States is planned.