The Mythmaker

The legend of Orpheus, the poet who charmed all nature with his lyre, and his descent into Hades in search of his lost Eurydice, has captivated artists and writers since antiquity. Film Maker Marcel Camus (Black Orpheus) and Playwright Tennessee Williams (Orpheus Descending) have put the legend into modern dress. But no contemporary artist has found the myth so richly allusive and central to his art as Sculptor Varujan Boghosian.

Aura of Tragedy. As artists go, Boghosian is something of a poet, whose expressive power stems from his skillful embroidery of associations, intimations and unspoken allusions. While the content of his work is literary, its expression is far from literal. Legend recounts, for instance, that Orpheus was torn limb from limb by Thracian women infuriated at his single-minded love for Eurydice; his severed head, still singing, floated down the river Hebrus. To recall this macabre event, Boghosian mounted a wooden doll's head that had been wrenched from its body onto a weathered plank from an old snip's hull. To suggest Orpheus' irrevocable loss of Eurydice, he set a delicately featured mask inside a fluted fireplace ornament, forever out of reach of a single outstretched hand.

Boghosian's assemblages may be read on many levels. Says Everett McNear, director of exhibitions for the Arts Club of Chicago, where a large show of Boghosian's sculpture is currently on display: "But when you look at the combination of wood, metal or whatever he has used, you feel as if they had grown that way. The result has an aura of tragedy and darkness and mystery that seems to come through it all."

Boghosian's own roots were far removed from Grecian lore. The son of an Armenian cobbler, he grew up in New Britain, Conn. After a stint in the Navy, he attended college under the G.I. Bill, finishing up with a year under the "hard but kind" tutelage of Bauhaus Master Josef Albers at Yale. Now 43, he teaches sculpture himself at Dartmouth. He first became interested in Orpheus during college days, and printed a small portfolio of woodcuts, accompanied by his own poetry. Years later, while he was picking up driftwood on a Provincetown beach, the story of Orpheus came back. He took to scavenging with a vengeance.

Play World. "Myth is real to me," Boghosian says. There were moments when it was almost too real as he began to see related shapes and symbols everywhere. He saw it in a farm harrow, the understructure of a funeral wreath that was shaped like a lyre, in dozens of tiny toy buglers he found in a flea market. At one point, after other children gibed at his young daughter about her father's playing with toys, Boghosian sat down and reflected on his purpose. "The play world becomes for the artist a real world," he concluded, "while the real world becomes a play world, in the sense that the artist uses everyday existence to stir his fantasy."

Today the most recurring objects in his sculptures are croquet and billiard balls ("the world, and also the idea of Orpheus as an entertainer and juggler"), dolls ("man in his universe"), and ironing boards ("connotations of heat suggest hell"). Weather, rather than paint, creates his mellowed patinas, as well as the myriad uses to which each object has been put. But more than any natural beauty, it is his arrangement into harmonious compositions that give Boghosian's rescued miscellany a sad, precious sense of fatality.

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