Varujan Boghosian
American, 1926 - 2020
Alexandre Gallery
Obituary
Valley News Interview
His work included assembled sculpture and two-dimensional collages and is part of the collections of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which exhibited “Varujan Boghosian: Master Manipulator,” one of his last major shows, in 2018.
Born in 1926 to Armenian immigrant parents in New Britain, Conn., Boghosian served in the Navy in World War II and went to college on the GI Bill, earning bachelor’s and master of fine arts degrees from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture. He was married to Marilyn Cummins in 1953. She accompanied him on a stay in Rome, on a Fulbright Grant, not long after they were married. She died in 2007.
Although his work bore the influences of a wide range of artists and writers, Boghosian was a movement of one. His income from teaching allowed him to remain independent of the art world, and he followed his own interests. His influence on art in the Upper Valley was substantial, however, as assemblage became a kind of house style, worked over by a number of skilled practitioners.He has held several teaching positions since 1958, and first taught at Dartmouth in 1968. From 1982, until his retirement in 1995, he was the George Frederick Jewett Professor of Art at Dartmouth.
