Les Grands Entretiens : Jean Boghossian & Roger Bertozzi

8 May 2025

At GemGenève in May 2025, the audience witnessed a rare encounter: an intimate dialogue between Jean Boghossian — jeweller, philanthropist, painter, sculptor, and writer — and his long-time friend, the philosopher Roger Bertozzi. What emerged was not only the story of a career but the portrait of a life marked by resilience, creativity, and an unyielding belief in the power of art as a language beyond borders.

Roots in Exile and Generosity

Jean Boghossian’s story begins with exile. His grandfather fled the Armenian genocide and settled in Aleppo, Syria, where he rebuilt a life through the family business of jewellery. As a child, Jean recalled watching his family distribute sugar and rice to the poor lining up outside their home. “It stayed in my mind,” he said, “that you have to share, even a bag of rice.” The image is vivid: a young boy at the door, seeing poverty and generosity intertwined, learning that wealth meant little if it was not shared.

From Aleppo, the Boghossians moved to Beirut. There, Jean came of age against the backdrop of civil war, where neighbour turned against neighbour, and life’s fragility was a daily lesson. One memory never left him: a boy soldier pointing a gun at him during a ceasefire. “He could have shot me,” Jean recalled. “I said to myself: how stupid to die like this. Get out of here.” That moment of suspended breath, between death and reprieve, taught him the absurdity of violence and the absolute value of life.

Humanitarian action became a necessity: projects in Armenia, Syria, and Lebanon — schools, music academies, orphanages, and scholarships — embodied the family’s commitment to alleviating suffering. But for Jean, philanthropy alone was not enough. He came to see that beyond food and shelter, what societies needed most was a change of mentality. That change, he believed, could come through art.

The Villa Empain: Art as the Answer

Exiled again, this time from Lebanon, Jean settled in Belgium. There, an abandoned architectural jewel caught his attention: the Villa Empain, a 1930s Art Deco masterpiece in Brussels. Squatted, vandalised, and falling apart, it might have discouraged anyone else. But Jean saw its potential. Against scepticism — even from his own family — he restored the villa to splendour, earning the prestigious Europa Nostra Prize for heritage conservation.

In 2010, the Boghossian Foundation was born, with Villa Empain as its home: a cultural centre dedicated to dialogue between East and West. “The language we need is not religion, not politics, not identity,” Jean explained. “The common language should be art. Art is the answer.”

For Jean, the Villa was also gratitude: a gift back to Belgium, the country that had welcomed the Boghossians as refugees. But even more, it was a legacy project. “I didn’t just want to leave a heritage,” he explained. “I wanted to leave an obligation to our grandchildren.” An obligation to carry forward dialogue, beauty, and peace. In one particularly moving moment in Geneva, Jean admitted through tears that his greatest artwork was not a painting or sculpture, but the Foundation itself — a message of peace carved into architecture.

The Jeweller’s Odyssey

For decades, Jean was a jeweller, continuing the family tradition that spanned six generations. The Boghossians’ story is written across three cities — Mardin in Turkey, Aleppo in Syria, and Beirut in Lebanon — all crossroads of ancient civilisations, but also scarred by war. Later, Antwerp, Geneva, and Brussels joined this constellation, linking the family name to the international gem trade.

In one legendary episode, Jean’s father sent him and his brother Albert to India, still young men, with a simple instruction: buy diamonds. The adventure led them to the Maharajas’ treasures, which had been disassembled under the pressure of a newly independent Indian state. Jean remembered watching pearls being poured into one bag, diamonds into another, as centuries-old jewels were broken apart. For him, the scene was symbolic: beauty scattered, yet waiting to be reassembled into new forms.

Jean returned not only with stones but with a conviction that coloured gemstones held a deeper beauty than diamonds. “Defects become qualities in coloured stones,” he reflected. “They are like art — unique, subjective, alive.” This way of seeing — that imperfection could itself be beauty — would stay with him when he later embraced painting.

Over the years, Jean travelled to Sri Lanka, Burma, Bangkok, and Colombia, pioneering new markets for gemstones. Yet even as he built success, he studied art in evening classes, quietly nurturing another vocation. Eventually, he passed the reins of the jewellery business to his brother Albert — who transformed it into the renowned Boghossian brand — while Jean prepared to embrace his second life: art.

The Awakening of an Artist

Jean’s artistic journey began with drawing lessons at six, imposed by his father, who believed every jeweller must know how to sketch. But his true awakening came later, sparked by a stolen gift. For his son Roberto’s ninth birthday, Jean had bought a painter’s box. When the boy showed little interest, Jean quietly kept it for himself — and began to paint. The irony was not lost on him: in giving a gift to his son, he had unknowingly given himself the gift of art.

Another revelation came at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, where Jean overheard a father teaching his child to distinguish Malevich from Kandinsky. Struck by his own ignorance, he realised that art required study, discipline, and commitment. “I could not be ignorant to that point,” he said. He enrolled in academies, studied for years, and began experimenting restlessly with materials and techniques.

His first lessons in painting also shifted his vision. An instructor placed a banana and an apple before him. “You want me to paint this?” Jean asked. The reply was simple: “It’s not about what you paint. It’s how you see it.” That lesson would never leave him. From then on, Jean painted not only with colours, but with perception.

Fire as Medium and Metaphor

Fire soon became Jean’s chosen medium. It was familiar: every summer, training for the jewellery business, he had worked with blowtorches, bending metal, setting stones. Decades later, he turned the torch on canvas. “What happens if I put fire on yellow paint? On black? What happens when the canvas burns?” Fire, he realised, was not only destructive but also creative — capable of transforming matter into beauty.

For Jean, fire was also a metaphor. It evoked the wars he had survived, the genocide his family had fled, the civil violence that marked his youth. “The genocide is fire, war is fire, civil war is fire,” he reflected. But in his art, fire became a partner, a dance. “Fire is hazard, and I am the will. It takes two to tango. Fire chose me, and I tame it.”

His works — fire paintings, ceramics, burned books, smoke drawings — embody this dialogue between hazard and control. Critics like Bruno Corà, President of the Alberto Burri Foundation, have compared his approach to writing: smoke traces resemble alphabets, burned books rise like phoenixes from ashes. For Jean, sublimating books with fire is not destruction but rebirth: “I am not burning culture. I am saving books from oblivion.”

Yet fire remained unpredictable. In one studio accident, a canvas burst into flames, forcing Jean to throw it out the window before the whole studio caught fire. It was a moment both comic and dangerous, a reminder that to work with fire is to live on the edge between creation and destruction.

Between Melancholy and Excess

If fire is Jean’s partner, excess is his temperament. “I am a bulimic in art,” he admitted. Ideas flood faster than execution, and discovery is endless. Yet his prolific energy is tempered by melancholy. His monumental sculpture at the Venice Biennale, inspired by Dürer’s Melencolia I, bore the names of three wounded cities — Aleppo, Beirut, Yerevan — etched into its surface. It was both personal and universal: an homage to destruction, but also to survival through creation.

Writing as a Parallel Voice

Alongside painting and sculpture, Jean has always written — fragments, aphorisms, and reflections composed on planes, trains, and in quiet moments. Influenced by traditions from Greek philosophy to Renaissance maxims, his texts combine poetic imagery with political urgency. Exhibited in Brussels to critical acclaim, they reveal another dimension of his creativity: the artist as thinker, the jeweller as writer.

Jean himself remains modest: “Writing was for myself,” he insists. Yet readers see literary value, and friends encourage him to publish. His fragments, like his artworks, are born of fire — compact, searing, alive.

A Legacy of Beauty

At the close of his dialogue in Geneva, Jean Boghossian reflected not on success, but on responsibility. “My best artwork,” he said, “is the Foundation.” For him, beauty is resistance, art is dialogue, and legacy is not wealth but obligation. In a world fractured by violence, he offers not answers but sparks: the spark of fire, of art, of thought.

The portrait that emerges is of a man who transformed exile into generosity, jewellery into art, fire into beauty, and a villa into a beacon of dialogue. Jean Boghossian’s life is proof that art is not escape but engagement — not luxury, but necessity.