Washington, DC — Ethiopian artist and pioneer of modern African art Alexander Skunder Boghossian was found prone and unmoving in his Washington, DC apartment on Sunday by friends who visited to congratulate him after viewing his paintings at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. Boghossian was pronounced dead at Howard University Hospital.
The cause of death is still unknown but the 66-year-old artist has been suffering from several ailments that have resulted in regular hospitalization in recent years.
Boghossian is widely considered the patriarch of a generation of Ethiopian artists. "It is a great loss," said one of them, Kebedech Tekleab.
The phrase is being echoed throughout the artistic community. "This is an enormous loss," said William Karg, who has represented Boghossian in New York for the past 16 years. Karg who has represented more than 30 artists, said Boghossian was "far and away the most talented artist I've ever represented."
"For me, Skunder is like a perpetual spiritual force as forefathers past... it is as if the ancestor and him have become one and the same," Elizabeth W. Giorgis wrote of Skunder long before his death. She is a collector of Ethiopian art who also works with Ethiopian artists in the United States.
In 1965, Boghossian was the first contemporary African artist to have work purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. "This was an not only an extraordinary artistic talent," says Karg. "That would certainly be enough [of a legacy]. But he was also a great teacher both at Howard university and in Ethiopia. He inspired the careers of both Africans and non-Africans."
In many ways, Boghossian's work was bound up with African-American life and culture. As a teenager an African American neighbor not only gave him his first feedback on his drawings, but introduced him to jazz. And throughout his life, jazz was often the backdrop of sound as he worked on paintings.
"Jazz is," he told a friend, Tom Porter, "a very heavy movement of the twentieth century. It is not one person; it is not one thought, it is a combination of geniuses... the constant modulation of concepts... It is the one thing we have, black folks, as artists..."
Born in Addis Ababa in 1937, Boghossian was awarded an "imperial scholarship" when he was 17 to study at London's St. Martin's School of Art. He extended his stay another nine years during which he moved to Paris, becoming a student and teacher at that city's Académie de la Grande Chaumière and at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts. In 1963 he was the first Ethiopian painter whose work was purchased by the Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris.
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Boghossian talked often of political and cultural influences in Paris during those years, citing Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Cheikh Anta Diop as well as creative forces in modern art like Paul Klee. Older, not very well-known black painters in Paris encouraged him. One of them, South African artist, Gerard Sokoto, introduced him to the great Cuban surrealist painter, Wilfredo Lam. He also worked closely with a group of West African artists. African colonies were becoming independent and he was part of "the creativity of resistance." says Elizabeth W. Giorgis. In 1963, Congolese poet Tchikaya U Tam'si characterized Boghossian as an artist with "purity of intention."
He returned to Ethiopia in 1966 and stayed until 1969 when he was invited to become artist in residence at Atlanta University, as well as resident instructor in sculpting, painting and African design at the Atlanta Center for Black Art.
But even during his short three years back in Ethiopia, Boghossian was one of a handful of artists who influenced an entire generation of painters with his energetic abstractions of tradition and use of vivid color. Many art critics and collectors point to Boghossian's work in particular at that time as establishing the standard for modern art in Ethiopia.
In 1974 Boghossian was invited to teach at Howard University where he taught until 2000 before returning to painting full-time.
