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

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

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.

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.

Iranian themes and aesthetics now possess Arasteh. Around 2000, the painter devised a new abstract style in which a myriad of small, geometric colored spots—mostly crimson, turquoise and pale almond green— carefully juxtaposed, seem wafted through space. These works all have titles containing the word symphony and indeed are suggestive of certain staccato rhythms of traditional Iranian music performed on the santoor. The player of this ancient dulcimer strikes each key with a mallet to produce a crisp, clear sound, much as Arasteh applies neatly defined color touches with the tip of his brush. The “Symphonies” vary in rhythm and density of hue. In 2006 Arasteh painted some of his most lyrical compositions in brilliant colors borrowed from the gemstones most admired in Iran: ruby red, lapis lazuli blue and emerald green.

Few others in the first great generation of Iranian contemporary artists influenced by Iranian aesthetics approach Mansoureh, Kalkhoran or Arasteh in quality. The younger Nasser Palangi sometimes does. The autumn 2006 group exhibition contained a painting of his that is as poetic as abstract art ever is: Diaphanous scrolls in lapis blue with gold specks unwind in an unreal space suggested with a consummate mastery of trompe l’oeil effects. An emerald green cypress appears on a small sheet suspended in midair that curls down at the top and is partly veiled by the semitransparent scrolls. The composition may be reminiscent of Magritte, but the overall effect recalls the varnished marbled paper that covers late 19th-century pen boxes, while the cypress bending in the wind is the timeless image to which Persian poets compare the swaying gait of a young beauty passing by. The color scheme of lapis, gold and green is pure Iranian vintage.

A similar spirit, profoundly poetic, can be recognized in the work of the Gudarzi brothers, who bridge the gap between Iran’s first generation of great contemporary painters and a new one, also inspired by the Iranian aesthetic legacy, that is now coming to maturity. The Gudarzis are thoroughly acquainted not only with Western artistic practice but also with Western art history and its concepts. Mostefa, born in 1960, holds a Ph.D. in figural art from Rennes University, in France, and another in art history from the Sorbonne, while Morteza, younger by two years, earned his Ph.D. in England. Morteza is a professional art historian as well as an artist, with a number of published books to his credit, including The Quest for Identity in the Contemporary Painting of Iran.

For the 2006 autumn show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Mostefa sent a picture that pushes further than any other the fusion of Iranian tradition with Western influence confined here to the technique of oil painting. Stylized turquoise cypresses and leafy, dark green plane trees cover the left side of the picture, creating a perspective effect reminiscent of 15th-century book painting. An ill-determined rocky face of blue-blackish maroon fills the right side. The palette of blues, greens and browns, although in tune with the Iranian tradition, does not imitate the past. The nuances are different, and the tones are unknown in the art of previous centuries.

The more intellectually oriented Morteza, with his art historian’s vivid awareness of contemporary Western trends, submitted to the same show an abstract composition that could easily be mistaken for the work of an artist from Paris or New York except for the palette: white, ultramarine and black shot through with slivers of dark red and touches of yellow. This comes close to the harmonies dear to the Iranian eye, the very colors that Matisse so much admired in Iranian book painting.

The interaction of East and West is reaching a new stage with the second great generation of contemporary Iranian artists marked by the heritage of their ancient culture. The integration of Western techniques is thorough, and the assimilation of various strands of influence complete, leading to a different art that opens up multiple avenues.

The 40-something Sharareh Salehi, born and bred in Tehran, offers a fascinating example of age-old tradition transformed into 21st-century modernity. As was often the case in earlier times, the artist is also a poet. In her latest phase, Salehi creates abstract compositions in intense, deep colors, thickly applied. Lines of gold lettering that are reminiscent of 10th-century Kufic inscriptions without actually spelling out words run down an abstract diptych that was shown in 2006 in the Lazar Art Gallery, run by Janet Lazarian. In another panel, richly textured dark red and black streams down the vertical format like the lava of an erupting volcano. In a third, also from 2006, a roll of film seems to have left a fading gray impression across a background of turquoise and black, creating the effect of moiré silk. Immensely talented and versatile, Salehi is likely to be much talked about in coming years, and not just in Iran.

A third generation of younger painters influenced by Iranian tradition, many of them female, is arising. Lazarian handles some of the most promising among these. Niloofar Rahnama, who was born in 1976 and received a master’s degree from the Azad University in Tehran in 2002, painted in 2006 an untitled composition in which pale green foliage surges in the foreground against what appears to be a steep mountain wall painted in tones of red merging into greens and yellows. Tiny trees spring up in the distance, perched on rocky mounds of a type that exist only in dreams. The perspective is rooted in the distant Iranian past, and yet this is very much a picture of our time.

Bita Vakili, who was born in 1973 and received a master’s from Tehran Art University, paints abstract pictures in delicate nuances of cold colors. Her brushwork is that of a very great master, and her aptitude at conjuring multiple images is astonishing. I saw some of her paintings at the Lazar Art Gallery. She was in love with the wind, of 2006, could depict a dark rocky shore beaten by the frothy surf of a choppy sea seen from a very high altitude. But it also suggests rain lashed across a glass pane by hurricane winds. Hope, a stunning 2006 masterpiece of crushed color applied with the tip of the brush, reminded me of the spring thaw on the Damavand mountain, north of Tehran, when the melting snow uncovers expanses of dark purples, green and turquoise. Such compositions, neither really Western nor truly Eastern, except for their capacity to incite dreaming, place Vakili among the foremost contemporary artists in the world.

I have not attempted to list all the Iranian artists deserving close attention. The autumn 2006 shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Lazar Art Gallery included several other fine painters whose ultramodern compositions in an Iranian palette share the intensely poetic atmosphere common to all great contemporary Iranian art. The name of Keyomars Ghurchiyan, whose abstract canvases were among the most original on display, should also be noted.

Virtually unknown to the wider international public, these artists have been overlooked beyond Iranian borders largely because no one has seriously tried to market their work abroad. In the many exhibitions organized by the remarkably active Museum of Contemporary Art, no differentiation is ever made between the many imitations of the international contemporary style, which vary from the mildly indifferent to the outright absurd, and the rarer painters who owe their strength and originality to a sensibility honed over 4,000 years.

Contrary to widespread perception, it is easy to travel inside Iran, where U.S. academics and museum curators continue to go, politics notwithstanding. Whoever gets in first and has the eye to sort out the greatest from the not-so-great stands to make some real coups. "Unseen Iran" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2008 Table of Contents.