Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist in Ethiopia in the late 1960s;
Private Collection, USA.

Alexander Skunder Boghossian was the first contemporary African artist to have a work acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. His career as an artist started in Ethiopia, where he won second prize at the Jubilee Anniversary Celebration of Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie I in 1954. Following this Skunder traveled to London on a scholarship to study at the prestigious St. Martins School and Central School of Art. He then taught at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris, returning to Ethiopia in 1966. It was during this short period in Ethiopia that he completed this particular Blue Composition . After a short stay at the School of Fine Arts in Addis Ababa, Skunder made the permanent move to the United States in 1972 where he taught at Howard University in Washington D.C. between 1972-2001.

Bibliography
E. Harney, Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora, (New York, 2003)

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