The 4th of May marks 20 years since the death of a painter of Ethiopian and Armenian descent, Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian. He died on May 4 at Howard University Hospital in Washington DC. Skunder was one of Ethiopia’s best-known contemporary artists and his work was exhibited internationally. He introduced vital and revolutionary innovations to the local art scene, alongside becoming a guiding force on the Ethiopian art scene.

Skunder was the recipient of many awards in Europe, Africa, and the United States, and was the first Ethiopian artist to have his work purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. On the anniversary of his death, here we provide a brief highlight of his life and legacy.

Born in Addis Ababa in 1937 to an Ethiopian mother and an Armenian father, Kosrof Boghossian, who was a colonel in the Imperial Body Guard of Haile Selassie, Skunder spent his childhood in Addis Ababa and his young adulthood in London, studying at Saint Martin’s School and Slade School of Fine Arts and in Paris studying and teaching at Grande Chaumière.

The artist’s real name was Eskunder (Alexander) Boghossian, but he used the shortened form of the name, Skunder, which became his name.

Although the artist taught at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa for only three years (1966–1969), he exercised an immense influence both on his peers and younger generations of artists. He brought to the teaching painting an extremely varied and valuable background. “To many, Skunder represents the quintessential Ethiopian and African modernist, a pioneer whose shoes have been difficult to fill,” say authors of the Ethiopian Passages: Dialogues in the Diaspora, a book to accompany a 2003 exhibition by the same name at the Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. According to the Dictionary of African Biography (2012) edited by Henry Louis Gates and Emmanuel Akyeampong, Skunder “enjoyed experimenting with a variety of materials and techniques and had in common with his Surrealist colleagues an interest in the subconscious mind, dreams, hallucinations, and creative flights of fancy occasioned by intentionally orchestrated “accidents” on the canvas or other painting surface.”

Skunder’s first exhibition at the Creative Arts Center of Addis Ababa in 1966 marked a pioneering approach to Ethiopian experimental art history. Stanislas Chojnacki, a historian of Ethiopian art and watercolorist, wrote a warm review of the exhibition noting that Skunder 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. Skunder has that rare quality of a truly great artist, he has his own artistic personality, which, like mirrors in Japanese temples, reflects his own thoughts, expectations and feelings.”

Sidney Littlefield Kasfir in Contemporary African Art  (1999) wrote even if Skunder was fundamentally Ethiopian in terms of his inspiration, his visual vocabulary had evolved over the years and had even included, at one point, neosurrealist elements inspired by his stay in Paris. “The subjects of some of his paintings are difficult to interpret. Some of his earlier surrealist works evoked cosmogonic events wrapped in delicate animal and bird silhouettes as in Rhonda’s Bird,” the author wrote.

The New York Times described his work as combining “European media like oil paint, crayon and ink with bark and animal skins.” “Often hallucinatory in quality and filled with intricately detailed figures and patterning, his work was influenced by Paul Klee, Max Ernst and the Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, but more strongly by Coptic and West African art,” the Times said in its May 18, 2003 obituary of the artist.

One of the most heartfelt tributes came from Elizabeth W. Giorgis, the former director of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies and the dean of the College of Performing and Visual Art of Addis Ababa University. In her seminal book Modernist Art in Ethiopia, she renders a personal journey of discovery with this artistic figure.

I remember the first time I met Skunder in 1996, when I presumptuously made an unsolicited visit to his studio space (which was also his home) in Washington DC. Music was blaring and the sweet aroma of Ethiopian incense besieged the air. We listened to Ethiopian Orthodox chants (teslote etan) at first, followed by Coltrane and music from Mali. Strangely enough, the selections seemed to correspond as complementing melodies, an impression Skunder reinforced by attributing the connections of each number to every other one. For him, the cohesion between the jazz lyrics of the African American, the melodious chant of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, and the rhythmic tune of the singer from Mali were all part of a natural reality. Each contained the other. He told me then that all his works were a “perpetual celebration of the varieties of blackness.

Skunder himself once explained the influence of the jazz spirit on his painting. “I always play jazz records when I paint, ” Skunder told writer and academic Kifle Selassie Beseat. “But jazz for me is more than a soundtrack; jazz provides me with a path of research that I do not somehow find in painting.”

Adressing the question of how to understand one’s identity, in an interview just a few days before his untimely death, Skunder had said, directly and simply: “That has always been a difficult question to answer: How do I see my identity in my work? I know who I am. I know where I am.  I’m in the greatest place of the whole world. [laughter] I’m at the Smithsonian!”