MARTIN BAROOSHIAN
SELECTED CHRONOLOGY
1929
Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, to Armenian immigrant parents who survived the Armenian Genocide. His Armenian and American inheritances become enduring sources within a body of artwork concerned with cultural memory, mythology, identity, transformation, and regeneration.
1948-55
Studies painting, printmaking, drawing, and watercolor at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where his teachers include Karl Zerbe, Ture Bengtz, and Richard C. Bartlett. Receives the Diploma in Studio Arts in 1952, B.S. in Education in 1953 and completes the school’s advanced fifth-year Graduate Certificate in Studio Arts in 1955.
1950-52
Receives significant recognition while still a student. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acquires his color woodcut Call of the Ancients in 1950;
the Addison Gallery of American Art acquires a woodcut in 1951; and the Library of Congress acquires several early prints and a complete portfolio.
1952
Completes the eight-color-woodcut Revelations of St. John Suite, which wins the Albert H. Whitin Traveling Scholarship for ecclesiastical art. Barooshian is the first undergraduate to receive the award.
1952-53
Travels through Europe, Egypt, the Middle East, and North Africa. In Paris, studies lithography with Jean Pons and Gaston Dorfinant. Encounters European tradition from ancient to modern, including the mature paintings of Arshile Gorky at the Galerie de France. He later recalls: “Gorky’s works gave me permission.”
1956
Studies experimental intaglio printmaking with S. W. Hayter at Atelier 17 in Paris. The experience becomes central to his development of a cross-media
visual language based on layering, reversal, pressure, color, material variation, and transformation.
1958
Receives an M.A. in Art History from Boston University and moves to the New York metropolitan area.
1960
Becomes supervisor of the Graphics Workshop for Professionals at Pratt Institute’s Graphic Art Center in Manhattan where he becomes integrated into the NYC art scene.
1960s
Discovers his breakthrough oil paint formulation based on notes left by 15 c. van Eyck brothers. Produces major body of biomorphic generative image systems: paintings, color intaglios, drawings, and more than 200 monotypes. Rather than separating painting from printmaking, Barooshian develops a single cross-media practice in which images migrate among media, continually changing form and meaning.
1963-74
Receives growing national and international recognition. He is included in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s 1963 Biennial of Contemporary American Oil Paintings, receives a one-person exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 1970, and serves as president of the Society of American Graphic Artists from 1972 to 1974. In 1974, he travels and studies in India through a United States information Agency and New York State program and receives the National Academy of Design’s Print Prize for Oberon.
1983
The Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts, presents The Inner World of Martin Barooshian: Drawings, Paintings, Prints, 1952–1983, his first major retrospective.
1990s–2010s
Continues transforming his visual language: recuting and recombining printing plates (incorporating illuminated miniatures originating in the 1970s),
beginning neo-pointillist paintings around 1995, and beginning a substantial body of black-and-white graphic paintings and works on paper around
2005. These late developments extend his longstanding concerns with accumulation, systems, organic emergence, and the migration of images across time and media.
2006
The Armenian Library and Museum of America (now the Armenian Museum of America) presents a fifty-year retrospective of his work.
2016-24
The Addison Gallery of American Art renews its engagement with Barooshian, acquiring prints and a painting in 2016 and another painting in 2024.
2019
Publication of Martin Barooshian: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Prints, 1948–1970 by Michael J. Russo.
2022
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, acquires 35 additional Barooshian works on paper, bringing its holdings to 36 works on paper. Barooshian dies after approximately seventy years of sustained artistic production. His final work on paper is completed, signed, and dated on the day of his death. The Martin Barooshian Artwork Trust is established under his estate plan.
2024
Academic panel about Barooshian is convened at the International Society for the Study of Surrealism annual conference in Paris, “Rediscovering the Biomorphic Surrealism of Martin Barooshian.”
2026
Acquisition of oil painting Revelation by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.