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• Title: Revelation

• Date: 1960

• Medium: Oil on canvas

• Dimensions: 38” x 52”

• Collection: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

• Acquisition date: 2026

• Acquisition source: Martin Barooshian Artwork Trust

• Other MFA holdings of Barooshian: 36 works on paper including

etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, drawings, and a monotype

• Related institutional milestones: First acquisition in 1950 of woodcut Call of the Ancients; additional 35 works acquired in 2022

Upon acquisition in 2022, Patrick Murphy, Lia and William Poorvu Associate Curator of Prints

and Drawings at the MFA, called Barooshian “a consummate printmaker, whose intriguing and

oddly overlooked body of work deserves to be celebrated alongside that of mid-century

contemporaries like Hayter, Helen Phillips, Fred Becker, and Gabor Peterdi.”

 

Description of Revelation

Martin Barooshian’s 1960 oil painting Revelation marks a major milestone in postwar American art—a defining statement of a brilliant cross-media language forged across painting, printmaking, monotype, and drawing. Rather than offering a literal reading of the biblical apocalypse, Barooshian transforms the narrative into a dense, nonlinear cosmos. Here, organic shapes,fantastical figures, and visionary symbols collide and dissolve within an intricate field of vivid color and complex space. The painting fuses the experimental logic of his printmaking background with a luminous, enamel-like handling of oil to achieve an extraordinary precision, saturation, and material richness that draws in the viewer.

 

The canvas presents a brilliant dialogue between high art and popular culture. Barooshian pulls his imagery from a vast universe, fusing Symbolist painting,

Surrealist transformation, and illuminated manuscripts with the graphic energy of comic books and midcentury science fiction. This apocalyptic energy

perfectly captures the cultural tinderbox of 1960, reflecting both Cold War nuclear anxiety and the excitement of the space age. Together, these

elements fuse into a generative image-system, creating an alive, shape-shifting landscape where meaning and emotion constantly evolve through a process of “biomorphing”before the viewer’s eyes. As MFA curator Claire Howard notes, Barooshian stands among the era’s most “original and innovative voices.” With Revelation, a richer, stranger, and wonderfully expansive history of postwar art is finally coming to light.

 

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Key Contacts

MFA: Olga Khvan, Senior Manager of Public Relations and Content Marketing: okhvan@mfa.org

Barooshian Trust: Michael Russo, Trustee and Curator: russo@martinbarooshian.org