Callaloo

Perhaps one could say that everything about Skunder’s life—the sizzling of his ideas or the over intensity of his artistic talent—is surreal and at times hard to imagine. I remember the evening in September 1996, when I was first introduced to him. I had expressed my intent to write an article on him when he told me to come back to his studio/workspace in Washington, DC, the following day. We met the following day with all intentions on my part to talk about his work. Instead, he gave me a bulk of videos, tapes, and books of Ethiopian history, of African American comedians of the 1970s, and of speeches of civil rights activists that I thought at first were totally inappropriate. He engaged me in unfamiliar, peculiar, and riddled conversations such as the Chalcedonian and Monophysite doctrine of the Orthodox Church. This doctrine, I later learnt, was a debate between two ideologies on questions of whether Christ’s nature remains altogether divine and not human even though he has taken on an earthly and human body with its cycle of birth, life, and death. Of course, I was puzzled by all these overtures at first, but then I realized that it was as if he wanted me to see the metaphor of his work, and rightly so, as the paintings of Skunder Boghossian are deeply expressive in a spiritual way where art is more than a language spoken. It is metaphysics, a critical study, or yet again a systematic view of Skunder’s own natural environment. The Chalcedonian and Monophysite discussion was to show me the interconnectedness of cultures as Monophysites, I found out, were the ones that trekked down from the Near and Middle East to the region of what is now called Ethiopia. And through my friendship with Skunder that began in September 1996, and lasted until his death in 2003, I found his artistic brilliance and passionate overtures connote a certain reality but always within a universal concept of ingrained myths, symbols, and allegories unique to people of color.

Skunder was born in Addis Ababa in 1937, to an influential father of Armenian descent and an Ethiopian mother. His training in art informally began at the then Teferi Mekonnen School. It was while he was a student at Teferi Mekonnen that he also met Larry Erskine, an African American neighbor who introduced him to the Voice of America jazz program that used to be relayed to Addis Ababa from Tangier. And ever since then, music, and particularly jazz, has molded and formed the colors and shapes of his canvas. In 1955, at the age of seventeen, Skunder won second prize in abstract art at the National Art Exhibition held for the Jubilee Anniversary Celebration of Emperor Haile Selassie. Following this success, he was awarded a scholarship to study abroad. He studied at the St. Martin’s School of Art and [End Page 10] Central School in London, the Academie de la Grand Chaumiere (1954–1956), and the Ecole Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris (1957–1966).

His upbringing in jazz took root in Paris where the best of African American jazz musicians had flocked. He knew them all: Bud Powell, Lester Young, Sonny Rollins, famed jazz musicians and the visual and aural particulars of the Paris jazz world. Pretending to be an assistant, he told me, he carried the saxophone of Sonny Rollins so as to get a front seat during Rollins’s performances, and had a part in Louis Armstrong’s 1961 movie Paris Blues. His fascinating presence amongst these jazz giants informed his exquisite knowledge in music. It was also in Paris that he met Andre Breton, the savant of the surrealist movement, who frequently came to the Grand Chaumiere and who conducted informal seminars that Skunder habitually attended. The South African artist Gerard Skoto, who Boghossian had also befriended in Paris, introduced him to the great Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam in 1959, at the Second International Congress of Negro Writers in Rome. It was then that Skunder became closely acquainted with pioneers of the liberation...