Valley News, NH
March 21 2015
Fodder for His Fascinations
At 88, Varujan Boghosian’s Artistic Influence Only Grows
By Nicola Smith
Sunday, March 22, 2015
The floor of Varujan Boghosian’s studio in White River Junction looks
as if it’s just seen a ticker tape parade. Deep in scraps of paper,
it’s messy in an agreeable way, evidence of a mind at work ‘ sorting,
organizing, discarding and using. The tables are littered with pieces
of old and unusual paper ‘ hand-written letters, early-20th-century
sheet music and images that Boghosian has cut out from newspapers and
magazines, and which he uses in the collages and constructions that
have made him an influential American artist since the 1950s.
`When I walk into the studio, the material dictates where I go,’ he said.
Boghosian picks up a child’s notebook, the kind with lined paper for
school exercises, and opens it to a picture that a child drew of a
brown hen with a red comb strutting across a beach. Under the picture
the child wrote, `Until one day, from way out on the sand flats, a
GIANT CHICKEN.’
It’s one syllable short of a haiku, but it has a haiku’s mysterious
internal logic and rhythm ‘ and its own surreal humor. Looking at it,
Boghosian laughs loudly. `Isn’t That Great!’ he said.
That’s a phrase you hear a lot in his company: His enthusiasms seem
boundless, and he emphasizes certain words and phrases as if he were
thinking in the upper case, with exclamation points dotting his
speech.
Where Boghosian got the notebook, he doesn’t recall, but he collects
children’s journals and coloring books, among scores of other objects
and curiosities, because he never knows what stray image or sentence
might worm its way into his art.
His house in Hanover is awash in stuff. His art hangs on the walls, as
does that of his friends. Shelves, bookcases and tables in his house
are strewn with horseshoes, hat forms, old-fashioned mechanical banks,
whiskey stirs, cigar boxes and small, carved wooden hands.
He is an avid junker, but his friends also send him objects they think
he’ll find compelling.
`Everything Is Fodder!’ Boghosian said.
Now 88, Boghosian retired as a professor of art from Dartmouth College
in 1995, after 27 years on the faculty, but is still enormously active
in the American art scene as an artist, mentor and consultant.
His works are in the collections of, among others, the Museum of
Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum and the Whitney Museum in New
York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the DeCordova
Museum in Lincoln, Mass.
An exhibition of his collages is on view at Big Town Gallery in
Rochester, Vt., through April 25, along with paintings by his longtime
friend and colleague at Dartmouth, Ben Frank Moss.
Boghosian, better known to his pals as Bugsy, has had a studio in
White River Junction for three years. He likes the town’s youthful
feel and concentration of artists, and when there he makes the rounds
of his favorite haunts. He has an impish sense of humor, and a child’s
curiosity and amazement at all the diversions the world has to offer.
Leaving his studio, he walks briskly down the street to American
Classics, an art and antiques gallery owned by Meryl Weiss. Is she
about to go to lunch, he asks her? No, she is not a lady who lunches,
she tells him. He looks aghast, as if she were depriving herself of
one of life’s greatest pleasures. `But you’d be GREAT at lunch!’
He stops on the way out, his attention caught near the door by an
eccentric carving, which Weiss has marked as being for sale, although
she’s not sure she really wants it to go. He asks Weiss what she is
charging for it. The price is minimal. Raise the price, Boghosian
exhorts, before popping out onto the pavement again.
`He’s very embracing,’ said Anni Mackay, director of BigTown Gallery.
`He quickly foreshortens the distance between him and you. It doesn’t
really matter who you are.’
Boghosian heads for the rear door of the Junction Frame Shop, whose
owner, Mark Estes, has worked with Boghosian for years. Boghosian
considers him indispensable, nearly a collaborator. Boghosian shows
Estes a new collage he wants framed, a Venetian scene that he has
tinkered with. `What are we going to do with this one?’ he asked
Estes.
Boghosian decides he doesn’t like the way he assembled it, so he
starts stripping away some black paper at the back. Estes and he
confer; they agree on how to frame it, and Boghosian is off again,
heading for the Tuckerbox Cafe, where he goes nearly every day for
coffee, and where he likes to flirt lightly with the baristas.
On the sidewalk he unwraps a Tootsie Roll that Weiss gave him; she
keeps a bowl of them in the gallery for visitors. He throws the candy
into his mouth as if he were throwing chum to a seal, and flicks the
wrapper on the ground, almost gleefully. `I love to litter!’
Other people’s throwaways, their flotsam and jestam, is the very stuff
of which Boghosian’s art is made. In his hands, objects have both a
second life, and an interior life. He’s a collector of words, images,
objects, paper, art and puns that seem to push up through his
unconscious, or are caught on the fly.
Butterflies are an image that occur frequently in Boghosian’s work,
and they serve also as a metaphor for his work. The way a butterfly
flits from one flower to the next may appear random, but it’s
purposeful, and in service to some larger universal design .
He has an uncanny sense of how to juxtapose apparently unrelated
images and words, many familiar from pop culture and art history, and
make of them something startling and original, as if you were seeing
these images for the first time, and discerning connections between
them that illuminate them in unexpected ways. Even the tritest images
‘ Victorian pink hearts and flowers, for example ‘ can be made fresh
in his hands. There’s an inevitability about Boghosian’s work, as if
the collages could not have been put together in any other way.
Mr. X , one of the collages in the BigTown Gallery exhibition,
exemplifies the elusive, and allusive, nature of his work. Boghosian
has used the outline of a man wearing a bow tie and a stiff collar,
the kind of man you’d see in an ad from Collier’s or the Saturday
Evening Post in the 1910s or 1920s. However, where you’d expect to see
facial features Boghosian has affixed a piece of sheet music which he
has rotated sideways.
On the sheet music there is a large X, which appears original, not
added by Boghosian. Is the man, who appears thoroughly conventional in
dress, actually a font of creativity? Or does the decisive X signal
that all the music humming through his brain is being short-circuited,
canceled out? And is it important to assign meaning to the image, or
does the artistry reside in its elegant inscrutability?
`His work kind of washes over me. I see this point of view that’s so
clear, but so fugitive at the same time,’ said Gerald Auten, the
director of exhibitions in Dartmouth’s Department of Studio Art, and a
friend since 1993.
Boghosian’s cultivation, his keen interest in literature, art, film
and music, feed into his art, said Mackay. `He’s a hoarder of
information and he uses all of it.’
In the last two years, Boghosian has worked furiously, making 200
collages, a number of which, matted but not yet framed, are stacked on
a table in the living room of his Hanover home. The floor is strewn
with piles of books about and by James Joyce, one of Boghosian’s
heroes.
He lives alone; his wife, Marilyn, died in 2007. Their only child,
Heidi Boghosian, lives in New York City and is director of the A.J.
Muste Memorial Institute, a social justice organization. Pr eviously
she was an executive director of the National Lawyers Guild. He has a
sister who lives in California.
Boghosian’s daily routine is this: Up by 8:30 a.m., coffee, shave,
shower and then a brief sojourn with Live with Kelly and Michael on
ABC. `I like to watch it because there’s nothing memorable about it.
It’s so relaxing,’ he said.
>From there he drives over to the Tuckerbox, spends time in his studio
and talks to colleagues. He’s home by 5, when he has a beer. He then
watches the news, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune . Not so good at
Jeopardy , he confesses. If there’s a good film on Turner Classic
Movies he’ll tune in. Or, aptly, given his love of the old, the
unusual and the eccentric he might also watch the Antiques Road Show
on public television. He goes to bed at midnight or later, usually
reading Joyce before sleep claims him. Poetry is central to his life,
and he unself-consciously scatters lines of poems throughout his
speech and art. Wordsworth, Louise Bogan, Wallace Stevens, Stanley
Kunitz.
Boghosian was born in New Britain, Conn., in 1926, the son of Armenian
immigrants. (In Armenian, Varujan means `dove.’) His father, George,
emigrated from a small village in central Turkey to the U.S. in the
early years of the 20th century, ending up in Massachusetts and then
Connecticut, where he worked as a cobbler.
Wanting a wife, George Boghosian wrote home to a friend who was
marrying a young woman in an orphanage. He asked his friend if he knew
of another young woman who might be suitable. There was: His fiancee
knew a girl named Baidzar Sylandjian, from a city on the Black Sea,
whose family had been killed by the Turks during the Armenian genocide
of 1915. Photographs were sent, and eventually, George Boghosian sent
her money to make the passage to the Americas. She landed in Mexico,
they married in Cuba and then went to New Britain. Those are the bare
facts: The details are vague, or unknown, to Boghosian.
`How these things happen, it’s hard to imagine,’ he said. His parents
did not manifest the humor Boghosian does. `They were too sad,’ he
said.
New Britain was a flourishing industrial town, with all the resources
a family could want: jo bs, a museum, a library, good schools.
Boghosian wanted to be an artist from grammar school on, but he
insists that he was not the best artist in his class. That distinction
belonged to a fellow named Shapiro. `But what happened to him?’
Boghosian asked. `You see what I mean?’
And look at Alphonse Tosco, another classmate, who excelled at grammar
and was also able to draw realistic-looking soldiers with both his
right and left hands! He went on to become an insurance salesman,
Boghosian said. `So you never know what happens.’
During World War II, Boghosian worked in a ball-bearing factory
pushing a food cart. He enlisted at 17 in the Navy, serving in the
Pacific theater, preparing for the invasion of Okinawa and later was
stationed in occupied Japan. At the end of the war he returned to New
Britain and, through the G.I. Bill, was able to do two years in the
Vesper George School of Art in Boston. ( Robert McCloskey, of Make Way
for Ducklings fame, was also a graduate.)
Boghosian then transferred to a teacher’s college, where he studied
literature. He was then awarded a Fulbright to Rome, and newly
married, brought his wife with him to Italy, a country they would
return to many times. When they returned to the U.S. some of his
friends encouraged him to apply to Yale University to study with the
Bauhaus artist and theorist Josef Albers.
Albers, who had worked alongside Wassily Kandinsky an d Paul Klee in
the Bauhaus, had emigrated from Germany in the early 1930s along with
a host of other artists and writers escaping the Nazi regime.
The architect Philip Johnson had arranged for Albers to have a post at
Black Mountain College in North Carolina. From there, Albers went to
Yale, and he liked Boghosian’s work enough to invite him to come study
with him.
Auten’s analysis is that the European artists who’d immigrated to the
U.S. `really affected him. They taught him that sense of proportion
and design.’
Boghosian received both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in
fine arts from Yale in the 1950s, which spurred him into both a
teaching career and a life as a professional artist. He’d seen the
assemblages of Joseph Cornell, and was inspired by the witty
constructions of Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray and the mischievous,
dream-like paintings of Klee. He began to pick up and look for found
objects wherever he was.
`He loves the idea of appropriation ¦ and getting you to see how it
can come together. He keeps moving and evolving,’ said Mackay.
Boghosian also moved from teaching position to teaching position.
Cooper Union and Pratt Institute in New York, Brown University in
Rhode Island and then Dartmouth in 1968. He has had two fellowships at
the American Academy in Rome, and is a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters in New York City.
In the early 1960s, Boghosian’s work came to the attention of the
Stable Gallery on West 58th Street in Manhattan, which was owned by
Eleanor Ward, who represented an astounding number of major post-war
American artists, including Willem de Kooning, Louise Bourgeois, Grace
Hartigan, David Smith and Franz Kline.
Boghosian showed her his hat form constructions, the wooden blocks
milliners use to shape hats. `I started taking little nails and
punching them into these hat block forms,’ he said. One hangs on a
wall of his house, a worn, wooden head-like shape into which Boghosian
hammered dozens of small nails that look like bristling hair. Making
them reminded him of his father who sat, nails in mouth, while he cut
out shoes for his children. Ward took him on as a client, and he
stayed with her through four shows.
He doesn’t talk in great detail about his own work, but leaves it up
to the viewer to assign meaning. Certainly, his work strikes a chord,
but why and how it does cannot be glibly defined.
`There’s this current of humor in the work but it’s also very serious.
That’s a very difficult combination to hold in any given piece, and he
does that in a masterful way,’ said Moss. `There’s a sense of
antiquity within the work, but also a very modern voice talking about
the time in which we live. The work retains a sense of mystery, it
doesn’t explain itself immediately, it reveals itself slowly, and in a
way that really carries and leaves a very distinct and valued
impression.’
Throughout his career his collages and constructions have been
exhibited around the country and in Europe. In 2014 he had a
retrospective at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, whose director,
Brian Kennedy, was previously director of the Hood Museum at
Dartmouth.
Boghosian’s art is sui generis . He didn’t follow the crowd. `The
thing is, I never lived in New York City. I never became an abstract
expressionist or pop artist. My teaching provided me with the money to
do my work without being dependent on sales. To be an avid collector
and junker allowed me to buy whatever I needed to further my point of
view. ¦ It all went back into my work,’ he said.
As a teacher, he was second to none, said Auten. `He inspired a belief
in each person’s potential. And he gave students an appreciation for
the mystery of each individual life.’
`I’ve met very few people who are as generous with his time and his
art work,’ said Bente Torjusen, director of the AVA Gallery in
Lebanon.
White River Junction artist Dave Laro’s assemblages and constructions
owe a debt to Boghosian, whom he met five years ago. `He hasn’t
forgotten what it’s like to be a child. I think that’s what he draws
from. He knows just what he can use and what’s going to work,’ Laro
said.
Lately, Boghosian has been reading the last pages of Finnegan’s Wake
before he goes to sleep. He finds them comforting, and sad. Whether
it’s Joyce or some other wellspring bubbling up from his unconscious,
Boghosian said he has been dreaming every night. `The strangest,
idiotic dreams that have nothing to do with anything.’
He is rummaging through a box, looking for one of his beloved
curiosities to show off. `On my death bed I’ll probably see all the
faces of these strange people who sold me stuff,’ he said.
Then he is off again, pointing excitedly to this collage, and that
collage; this wooden toy and that little figurine.
`Isn’t That Great?!’ he marveled.
-¡
Nicola Smith can be reached at [email protected].
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.vnews.com/lifetimes/16159528-95/fodder-for-his-fascinations