In her finest pictures in this style, Mansoureh paints letters but does not spell out full names. An untitled composition of 1999 is a whirlpool of blue streaks of paint with dashes of white and red and very small letters falling through, dispensing some cryptic message. But her true masterpieces are her purely abstract works with titles implying figuration. The subject, although not depicted, is hinted at. In Raqsi Chenin (“A Dance Like This”), bands of turquoise and gold twirl around one another, suggesting the swirling of traditional dancing in northern Iran.

Mansoureh is not the only one in the first generation of Iranian contemporary artists who practices suggestive abstraction. Sedaghat Jabbari Kalkhoran, who had a different, homegrown training, paints abstract compositions in a palette that also harks back to the color harmonies of past centuries.

Here, too, a sense of rhythm underlines the permanence of Iranian aesthetics. In a 2006 untitled composition included in a remarkable group show held at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in the autumn of 2006, swaying bands of color bear a striking analogy to the flamelike movement of the mythical bird Simorgh’s wings as it sweeps across the sky in 16th-century book painting. The trails of intense lapis blue that undulate across a ground of gold and turquoise create a color harmony that goes back to the deepest past of Iran, beyond even the founding of the first empire that unified Iranian lands in 559 b.c.

If Mansoureh’s paintings, exhibited many times in Tehran, might have had some influence on Kalkhoran, no such connection can be assumed regarding the other major master of the first great generation of contemporary artists whose works bear the stamp of Iranian aesthetics: Nasser Arasteh. Born in 1942, Arasteh, who graduated from the Tehran Faculty of Fine Arts in 1970, enjoyed no exposure to the West during his formative years. As a young artist, he tried his hand at a wide range of styles. He drew preparatory sketches in pen and wash for book illustrations in a figural style of derivative Western inspiration, designed posters and became extensively involved in magazine layouts. These activities, chiefly dictated by the necessities of life, did not deter him from his central purpose: painting for art’s sake.

With surprising versatility, Arasteh explored multiple avenues. In the 1969 abstract Kumpuzisiyun (“Composition”), colored crystals with triangular facets tumble over one another. This may reflect an awareness of such Western schools as Cubism, Italian Futurism or pre–World War I Russian Rayism. His Rectangular Composition, also of 1969, could be depicting gleaming glass panes in free fall sending back red, yellow and white reflections. The Cubist stylization, associated with a strong sense of movement, and the use of toned colored surfaces place this picture in a category of its own.

For a while Arasteh hovered over both sides of the border separating figuration that veers into abstraction from abstraction with strong suggestions of figural reality, as if he were trying to transcribe colored dreams. In Bandar (“Harbor”), a 1991 watercolor, fragmented reddish sailboats and their darker reflections in the water can still be made out, but in Gardane-ye Heyran (“The Mountain Pass of Amazement”), also done in 1991, fluffy blobs of pink, almond green and blackish brown could be either blossoming flowers or leafy trees springing up from an unreal white haze. By then, Arasteh was firmly headed to abstractionism. In Tolu (“Sunrise”), a 1987 watercolor, a glaring white globe emerges from dark blue splinters and projects blazing red beams into one corner—the real world is remote. A year later, a watercolor merely titled Composition reduced the sunrise to a prismatic burst of rays.

Arasteh’s conversion to abstraction did not stop him from occasionally indulging in flower still-life painting, sometimes in perfectly figural fashion. The most beautiful are watercolors tersely done in just a few touches. Laleh (“Red Anemone”), 1995, deals with the oldest theme of Persian poetry: the red flower that blossoms in springtime and is associated with the most important Iranian holiday, Nowruz, or New Year, celebrated on March 21.