Continuity and Change: Three Generations of Ethiopian Artists

Abstract

the horizontal composition hints at the setting sun and winter-bare branches and resonates with the artist’s more representational landscape and still life paintings. CmYK p74 09293 • 20702419 summer 2007 african arts | 75 6 Skunder Boghossian. Night Flight of Dread and Delight, 1964. oil and mixed media on canvas with collage. 143.8cm x 159.1cm. (565⁄8 x 625⁄8). North carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, purchased with funds from the North carolina Art Society (Robert F. Phifer Bequest 98.6) Night Flight of Dread and Delight suggests the enchantment of dreams and the menace of nightmares. The midnight sky explodes with jewel-like stars and orbs, biomorphic forms, a winged spirit and an ascendant owl. Intrigued by the works of surrealist painters in Paris, Skunder Boghossian drew on age-old Ethiopian and West African stories about powerful visions, supernatural forces and mystical transformations. As Solomon Deressa has pointed out, at the time he was reading the novels of Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, which are filled with imagery of spirits and nightmarish metamorphoses. and employed abstraction, expressionism, surrealism, and other modern styles but developed new visual vocabularies that were contemporary and international yet distinctively Ethiopian. When Gebre Kristos held his first exhibition in Addis Ababa in 1963 he was sharply criticized for abandoning Ethiopian representational traditions to embrace European-inspired abstraction (Achamyeleh 2006:13). He emerged as an eloquent champion of expressionistic and abstract art (Fig. 5) and encouraged his students to experiment with contemporary styles and materials. As a sculptor and poet as well as a painter he was also an unwavering advocate of interdisciplinary experimentation. As such, he was a driving force during the “Addis Summer,” a term coined by Solomon Deressa to describe the florescence of visual, literary, and performing arts in Addis Ababa in the 1960s (Solomon 1997:14). In 1965 Gebre Kristos won the Haile Selassie I Prize Trust Award for the Fine Arts for being “largely responsible for introducing non-figurative art into this country” and for having “outstandingly contributed [to] the growth and evolution of Ethiopian Art” (Head 1969:20). Although by this time Haile Selassie was more interested in maintaining and expanding authority and control than in modernization and reform, he still paid at least token tribute to the role of contemporary artists in Ethiopia’s progress. In Paris Skunder Boghossian studied at the Ecole nationale superieure de beaux-arts and the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere. However, he spent most of his time in cafes and jazz clubs, museums and artists’ studios, reveling in the intellectual and artistic fervor of the city. Through his exposure to philosophers and writers such as Cheikh Anta Diop, Aime Cesaire, and Leopold Senghor and artists such as Andre Breton, Roberto Matta, Wifredo Lam, and Gerard Sokoto, he explored theories of Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and surrealism. He studied traditional African art and systems of thought through his friendship with Madeleine Rousseau, an art historian and collector (see Solomon 1997:19–23). Skunder’s compositions of his Paris years, with their kaleidoscopic layering of form, meaning, color and design, reflect his interest in pan-African themes as well as his Ethiopian heritage (Fig. 6). Stanislas Chojnacki wrote a glowing review of Skunder’s first solo exhibition in Addis Ababa in 1966: “Above all he has demonstrated that his long stay abroad did not result in a simple copying of foreign models. His art is obviously permeated by trends and achievements of modern art; these, however, are digested and moulded into his own style” (Chojnacki 1966:184). As Afewerk Tekle and Gebre Kristos Desta had been before him, Skunder was awarded the Haile Selassie I Prize Trust Award for the Fine Arts in 1967 in recognition of his contributions to introducing modern painting into Ethiopia. He taught at the Addis Ababa Fine Arts School for only three years before moving to the United States. He was on the faculty at Howard University in Washington DC from 1971 to 2001 and a number of students followed from Ethiopia to study under him there. Today Skunder is fondly remembered in Addis Ababa from his brief tenure on the faculty of the Fine Arts School. Among the CmYK p75 09293 • 20702419 76 | african arts summer 2007 8 Gebre Kristos Desta. Design for a poster for the play Struggle for Victory, 1977. Ink and water color on paper, 40.6cm x 63.5cm (16 x 25) collection of Mesfin Gebreyes oda, Addis Ababa. During the Derg regime that ruled Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991, Gebre Kristos Desta, like all faculty and students at the Fine Arts School, was called on to design posters, banners and other ephemera for the Marxist government. This drawing is the preliminary design for a poster advertising a play of the same name, which glorified the revolutionary uprising that overthrew Haile Selassie in 1974. youngest generation of art school graduates his name is legendary but, in fact, they know little about his work. Few paintings by Skunder remain in Ethiopia and those are primarily in private hands and inaccessible to most artists and students. Gebre Kristos Desta, on the other hand, taught at the Addis Ababa Fine Arts School for sixteen years, from 1962 to 1978, and profoundly influenced many second-generation modernists in Ethiopia. Important paintings by Gebre Kristos are prominently displayed in some of Addis Ababa’s public buildings such as hotels and banks, so that his distinctive style and subjects are well known to younger generations of artists as well. One of the painters who acknowledges her indebtedness to Gebre Kristos as teacher, mentor and friend is Desta Hagos, the only woman of her generation to make a successful career as an artist. After graduating from the Addis Ababa Fine Arts School with a diploma in painting she studied in the United States and earned a BFA degree from Catholic Lutheran University in 1973. Desta’s return to Ethiopia coincided with the Revolution of 1974, which tore her family apart. When her husband fled the country in order to escape execution, Desta was not allowed to leave and raised their daughter alone. Despite these hardships, she remained active as an artist. In 1976 Desta took a job with the Ethiopian Tourist Organization in the Public Relations Office. Ten years later she transferred to the Ethiopian Tourist Trading Enterprise, where she served as head of the Artistic Activities Department until retiring in 2002. She now makes her living as a painter. Much of her work is concerned with the daily lives and emotional struggles of women, although she also paints still lifes, landscapes, and abstract compositions that reveal the enduring influence of Gebre Kristos in both style and subject matter. While a student at the Fine Arts School Desta shared a studio with four male artists at the Creative Arts Center of Addis Ababa University, a venue for exhibitions, theatrical productions, musical and dance performances, and poetry readings. Desta often attended gatherings of writers there, including painter/poet Gebre Kristos Desta, art critic/poet Solomon Deressa, poets Mengistu Lemma and Tsegaye Gebre Medhin, and journalist Be’alu Girma, who later was killed by the Derg. She was friends with prominent actors Debebe Eshetu and Wogayeh Negatu and was persuaded by them and Mengistu Lemma to play the female lead in a Chekhov play translated in Amharic by Mengistu (she does not recall now which play it was). Leaving aside acting to concentrate on her art, Desta continued to be an enthusiastic member of the audience for performances at the Center and other venues. In The Stage (1969; Fig. 7) Desta captures the energy, movement, creativity, and imagination of theatrical productions during the Addis Summer of the 1960s. 7 Desta Hagos, The Stage, 1969. oil and collage on board, 108.9cm x 83.8cm (427⁄8” x 33”). collection of the artist. PHoTo coURTESy oF THE NoRTH cARolINA MUSEUM oF ART In this painting executed while she was a student at the Addis Ababa Fine Arts School, Desta Hagos captures the energy, movement, creativity and imagination of theatrical productions during the “Addis Spring” of the 1960s. The composition is drawn from her imagination and from her general impressions of the theater rather than from a particular stage production. She wanted to convey that the audience is part of the drama so that there is no real distinction between the