Marcos Grigorian was a pioneering Iranian artist who was lost too soon.

Marcos Grigorian was born in 1925 to Bāgrāt Grigoriān and Šušānik Māngoiān, both of whom were born in Kars, Armenia. He was the youngest of three siblings in a family that moved a lot. Before Grigorian was born the family moved from Armenia to Kropotkin, Russia, then to Tabriz when Marco was five years old. When his mother died of appendicitis that same years, the family moved to Tehran. When his father remarried, the family moved to New Julfa in Isfahan but eventually moved back to Tehran when Grigorian was fifteen years old. It was quite the nomadic lifestyle for a kid growing up but Marco surprisingly kept it up when he graduated from school and moved to Rome to attend the Academia di Belle Arti. And after he graduated, shocker, he moved again, this time back to Iran to start the Gallery Esthetique, which centered around coffee house painting, which is basically folk art specific to coffee shops.

Then Grigorian found love. He married Florā Ādāmiān in 1955 and the couple moved back to Rome and had their daughter, Sabrina in 1956, which also happened to be the first year that Grigorian participated in the Venice Biennale. The family then popped back to Tehran when Grigorian was appointed Head of the Graphic Department at the Ministry of Culture and Art. Unfortunately in 1960, the Grigorians got a divorce and as a sort of midlife crisis, Marcos became an actor. He was pretty good at playing villains, but his true talents were in art, not film.

You would think that the nomad thing would get old after awhile but alas, it did not. Grigorian had an “America” phase and lived in New York and Minnesota while working on being one of the foremost innovators of the earth art movement. Recently his work was included in a MoMA permanent collection rehanging that doubled as a protest against President Trump’s executive order on immigration that banned any citizens of several majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. Go MoMA! Go Grigorian!

All was well in Grigorian’s life until one day in 2007 two robbers broke into his house and beat him severely. Grigorian had just sold a house and the robbers were under the impression that there was an immense amount of cash in the artist’s residence. When they found out there was no cash, they beat him unconscious. Grigorian was in the hospital for several days before being released. Unfortunately, the day after, Grigorian had what doctors think was a massive heart attack and died.