Unseen Iran

Rene Magritte Parviz Tanavoli In Brief: Sotheby's The Persistence of Time Magritte Stolen in Armed Robbery James Ensor Impressionist & Modern Art In Brief: Christie’s

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Few would think of Iran when looking for unexplored venues of contemporary painting. Yet it is in that age-old culture that the next artistic gold mine lies ready to be quarried. Three succeeding generations of contemporary painters marked by the aesthetics of one of the oldest civilizations in the world have produced some of the most beautiful works of our time.

The urge to tap new sources in order to satisfy the everexpanding demand for contemporary art is simply too strong for some of the most talented creators on the world scene to be ignored much longer. The works of the artists introduced here sell on the Iranian market at prices mostly ranging between $2,000 and $20,000. Artists such as Nasser Arasteh can be contacted from abroad on their personal Web sites. Others can be reached via the Web sites of the galleries that handle their work, like the Lazar Art Gallery, run by Janet Lazarian, in northern Tehran.

This is not to suggest that all Iranian painters, or sculptors for that matter, have escaped attention. Some have been sought after in the Western world. Paintings by the Tehran-born Abstract Expressionist Kamran Katouzian are in the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, as are three-dimensional works by Parviz Tanavoli. In the April auction at Christie’s Dubai of contemporary Arab and Iranian art, one of Tanavoli’s sculptures fetched $2.8 million, a record for the artist. But like other Iranians who have achieved recognition in the global art market, Katouzian and Tanavoli essentially belong to the international contemporary school. The painters who remain to be discovered are those whose art is cast in the mold of Iranian aesthetics, not by design but by deeply rooted instinct. They do not belong to an organized movement, nor are their works remotely connected to the revivalism that only leads to kitsch of the worst kind in Iran—whenever attempts are made to paint in the manner of 16th and 17th-century manuscript paintings known as “Persian miniatures.”

The first generation of great contemporary painters are now in their late 60s or older, and their backgrounds vary greatly. Mansoureh Hosseini, from Tehran, was born in 1926, and Nasser Arasteh, from Kermanshah, in 1942. While both worked and exhibited long before the revolution that brought down the Shah’s regime in February of 1979, none curried favor with the powers that be. In their art, each went his or her own way, but their works all share one feature: As they progressed, the imprint of Iranian aesthetics became ever more visible in their color schemes and sense of rhythm.

Only one of the artists from the first generation, Mansoureh, obtained a measure of international recognition, largely because after completing her postgraduate degree at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts, she spent years in Italy. A chance meeting in 1959 with Lionello Venturi, the art historian who wrote about the Impressionists, among others, spared the young woman the mistake of getting bogged down in the French post-Fauve style that she was practicing at the time. The Italian writer wryly remarked that he would have hailed her as a genius a half-century earlier, but now she was 50 years behind the times.

Mansoureh, as she signs herself, quickly developed her first original style, which is best described as swirling abstractionism. Color rolls like water in heavy seas in an untitled composition that is reproduced in Pioneers of Iranian Modern Art: Mansoureh Hosseini, the bilingual book in Persian and English edited by Ruyin Pakbaz and Yaghoub Emdadian, which accompanied her 2004 retrospective at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The double curve of the Arabic letter ’ayn is lodged within a larger curve in an allusion to the name of Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad and first caliph recognized in Shiite Islam. In another abstract composition, painted a year later, Goriz be su-ye Nur (“Flight Toward Light”), which hangs in the Visual Arts Center in Tehran, turquoise lettering that seems to be ripped into shreds by a furious tempest dances against a backdrop of swirling gold with touches of green. Here the letters suggest the names Hasan and Husayn, Ali’s sons, revered as martyrs by Shiites.