The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Makes Landmark Addition Acquiring Oil Painting Revelation (1960) by Martin Barooshian
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) and the Martin Barooshian Artwork Trust are pleased to announce the MFA’s acquisition of Martin Barooshian's oil painting Revelation (1960), a landmark addition to its permanent collection. Among the earliest works from Barooshian’s mature period, Revelation shows his distinctive visual language coming fully into view: a vibrant ever-shifting world of biomorphic forms, fantastical figures, symbolic imagery, layered patterns, and bold color. Revelation joins 36 Barooshian works on paper already at the MFA, deepening the museum's commitment to an artist whose full significance is only now receiving the institutional recognition it deserves.
Revelation offers a vivid reminder that postwar American art was richer, stranger, and more alive than dominant narratives have long suggested. In place of the scale, gesture, and spectacle of postwar modernism, Barooshian’s visual language is rooted in density, psychological and emotional engagement, and a vision of nature as a vital, interconnected force — resisting categorization and proposing a fundamentally different model for American art. Barooshian traced a parallel path that moved fluidly through abstraction, figuration, symbolism, and organic form, shaped by sources ranging from Renaissance and Baroque art to Symbolism, Surrealism, Arshile Gorky, comics, cinema, and the anxieties of the Cold War era.
