Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian

Abstract

Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian Charles Henry Rowell Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 7] In his interview with Lodie Robinson, Skunder offers us an important description of his work: In all my work, color is never a mere simulacrum of nature, but is used to illuminate, to create super imposed dimensions of form and shape, which in turn enables the viewer to first see the painting as a unit, then as a simultaneous breaking up of images, and finally as a recognition of the identities, for vision has no contour. Each viewer may thus see an endless number of images, according to his individual disposition; the images seen one day may have intermingled to form new images the next day, or even to have silently disappeared. One must mystically interpret my paintings, for they translate reality by using images of the non-real. And for this reason, in my best paintings, the figures seem to have emerged by themselves from the canvas, instead of having merely been placed there. Painting for me is not an artificial construction of relationships craftily imposed upon an exterior world. For me the meaning of my paintings is found in the expression of an inarticulated sound from within, a message for the viewer. Skunder’s comments about his art might be read as an ars poetica or an artist statement. Whatever the case, the comments he offers us are, however indirectly, a directionscore on reading art—especially that which originates from the complex interior geography of its creator. ________ Chika Okeke-Agulu concludes his engaging article “African Artists and the Pan African Imaginary” in Nka (33, fall 2013) with this seminal statement: To the extent that their individual responses are inscribed in their art, it is safe to say that for Africa’s artists, as for their African American counterparts past and present, Africa remains a site of powerful imaginaries, a historical place to which they are bound by ancestry, and an idea that elicits powerful aesthetic and symbolic action. (69) Earlier in the same article, Okeke-Agulu describes what might be considered as Skunder Boghossian’s third major development as a visual artist. Okeke-Agulu judiciously argues that . . . if Paris initiated Boghossian into the world of Négritude and latter-day Pan-Africanism, and if his return to Ethiopia and travels in Africa affirmed his intellectual alignment with African cultural and artistic mythopoeic traditions, his sojourn in the United States beginning from 1970, at the height of the Black Arts movement (BAM), made him utterly aware of the shared histories, politics, and cultures of continental Africans like him and their African American counterparts. Although he mostly avoided directly political themes in his pre-America paintings—most certainly because he was concerned earlier with affirmative meditations on the birth and promise of independent Africa—the radical [End Page 8] politics of Black Power and the BAM in the United States seems to have inspired paintings with coded and overt political themes, such as Black Emblem (1969), The End of the Beginning (1972), and DMZ (1975). Boghossian’s involvement with the BAM impacted his work in another way. Whereas his earlier paintings largely depended on the combination of biomorphic forms and minutely detailed abstract notations, he populated the space of his new work with bold, polychromatic, geometric, and more decisively “African” motifs. It seems to me that there is an obvious affinity between his new, BAM-period style and that of the members of the AfriCOBRA, whose work, as Jeff R. Donaldson noted in the group’s unofficial manifesto in 1970, aspired to “symmetry that is free, repetition with change, based on African music and African movement. The rhythm that is easy syncopation and very very human. Uncontracted. The rhythm the rhythm the rhythm rhythm rhythm.” (62) ________ Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian, a painter and educator, was born in 1937 to an Ethiopian mother and an Armenian father. A precocious youth, he was given a government scholarship, which allowed him to travel to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, and two years later to Paris, where he studied and taught at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1966...