Born in Chelsea, Massachusetts, Martin Barooshian earned undergraduate and graduate diplomas with highest honors in 1952 and 1955 from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, his BS in education from Tufts University and MA in art history from Boston University. The Albert H. Whitlin traveling fellowship allowed him to travel in Europe in 1952and 1956 he studied lithography in the Parisian ateliers of Gaston Dorfinant, Jean Pons, and etching and engraving in Stanley William Hayter’s renowned Atelier 17.

Throughout his long and highly productive career, Barooshian has devoted himself equally to painting and printmaking. All of his work reveals his ongoing fascination with surrealism, symbolism, and subconscious imagery, inspired by the work of Paul Gauguin, Jean Miro, and Arshile Gorky. Of the latter Barooshian has said, “Gorky’s works gave me permission. They demonstrated that one could develop a rich personal vocabulary expressed in biomorphic abstract shapes that speak universally. I was forced to become emotionally involved by their overwhelming power, seeing forms and figures in beautifully rendered fields of color.” As a contemporary critic has observed of the artist’s work, “Barooshian approaches his subjects with a sense of immediacy, sensitivity, and sophistication. . . .[He invites one to] peer into an unpredictable world filled with life affirming surrealist fantasies and joyous abstract design.”

This summer, the artist, whose association with Addison director Bartlett Hayes when he was an aspiring art student, has fostered his long-standing appreciation for the Addison, donated his 1952 painting, Garden of Earthly Delights, and a selection of four prints that amply demonstrate his imaginative, energetic, and powerful skill as a painter and printmaker. They join a color woodcut, Call of the Ancients, purchased for the collection by Hayes in 1951, to create a body of work that will in its turn inspire and instruct present and future students at Phillips Academy.