Skunder Boghossian

Biography

In 2001, while Skunder Boghossian was working with Kebedech Tekleab on a commission for the Embassy of Ethiopia in Washington, he once refused to start work in the studio. An assistant had begun before the artist had a chance to commune with his “jujus”. Boghossian usually began the day by sprinkling the house with St Michael’s holy water, meditating, burning incense and, turning to the “jujus”, asking for forgiveness and blessings. It was not religion in the strict sense, more a tribute to his ancestors, Armenian and Ethiopian.

The commission was called “Nexus”. It is an aluminium relief measuring 365 by 1,585 centimetres on the granite wall of the embassy, and in it the symbols of Ethiopia’s Christian, Jewish, Islamic and indigenous spiritual traditions are interwoven with scrolls, musical instruments, tools, plants and animals.

He was born on 22 July 1937 in Addis Ababa, a year and a half after the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, when the city was part of Italian East Africa. His mother, Tsedale-Wolde Tekle, was Ethiopian; his father, Kosrof Gorgorios Boghossian, was Armenian, a colonel in the Imperial Guard and a member of the resistance. In 1938 the Italian authorities imprisoned his father for seven years, and the boy and his sister were brought up by their uncle, Kathig Boghossian. At a traditional kindergarten he was taught the Ge’ez script; at school he became fluent in Amharic, Armenian, English and French. He studied art informally at the Teferi Mekonnen School and took lessons from Stanisław Chojnacki, a historian of Ethiopian art and a watercolourist. A neighbour, the African American Larry Erskine, was the first to comment on his drawings and introduced him to jazz through the Voice of America. Jazz played in his studio for the rest of his life.

In 1954 he won second prize at the jubilee celebrations of Emperor Haile Selassie I, and the following year he went to London on an imperial scholarship, studying at Saint Martin’s School of Art, the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Slade School of Fine Art. In 1957 he moved to Paris: the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, then the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. According to a contemporary, he never completed the course. In Paris, though, he talked constantly about Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Cheikh Anta Diop and Paul Klee, met the Cuban Surrealist Wifredo Lam through the painter Gerard Sekoto, and worked alongside a group of West African artists. He was invited to the Second Congress of Negro Writers and Artists in Rome. In 1963 the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris bought one of his works, the first acquisition it had made from a contemporary African artist. After his 1964 exhibition at the Galerie Lambert he was invited to join the avant-garde movement Phase, which he soon left to work with André Breton. In 1965 the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired his “Juju’s Wedding” (1964).

In 1966 Boghossian returned home and taught at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa until 1969. In 1967 he received the Haile Selassie I Prize for Fine Arts and first prize at an exhibition of contemporary African painters in Munich.

In 1970 he emigrated to the United States. In Atlanta he encountered the Black Arts Movement and taught at the local Center for Black Art, and from 1972 to 2001 he taught at Howard University in Washington. The politics of Black Power entered his canvases openly or in code: “Black Emblem” (1969), “The End of the Beginning” (1972), “DMZ” (1975). Earlier he had built his pictures from biomorphic forms and tiny abstract notations; now he filled the space with bold, multicoloured, geometric “African” motifs. In 1977 he became the first African to design a first day cover for a United Nations stamp: a pen-and-ink drawing on the theme “Combat Racism”, with the cover and stamp issued on 19 September.

He drew on very old art: the wall paintings of Ethiopian churches, illuminated manuscripts, Coptic markings, the magic scrolls of the däbtära. He called his composition of intertwined, interlocking images “quflfu”, meaning “the interlocked”, and it recalls Ethiopian basket weaving and the patterns of the tebab. Sometimes he scraped old scrolls, leaving only a shadow of the original image, and painted over it. He worked on canvas, hardboard, bark cloth, aluminium and paper. I think the rhythm he valued so highly came to him from jazz as much as from the manuscripts. The viewer, as he intended, first sees the painting as a whole, then its breaking up into images, and only then recognises the figures themselves.

Skunder Boghossian died on 4 May 2003 in Washington, at Howard University Hospital, at the age of sixty-five. The umbrella body for Ethiopia’s oldest secular schools bears his name: the Skunder Boghossian College of Performing and Visual Arts.