© 2009 Patrick McMullan Photography

Hossein Amirsadeghi

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Art has been in the service of politics and religion from time immemorial. Possessing a great and ancient civilization with strong cultural and visual art traditions, Persians have used many mediums over the centuries to express their political sentiments. But given the Iranian people’s manifest expression of their political sentiments on the streets of Tehran and other major cities around the country during the past weeks — an outpouring of opposition to tyranny and religious regimentation — the stakes have never been as high for art and culture in Iran during the past 100 years as they are today.

The first Persian painter is widely thought to have been the 3rd-century A.D. prophet Mani. This visionary, whose teachings were to evolve into one of the most widespread religions of the 5th and 6th centuries, known today as Manichaeism, was flayed alive by the Zoroastrian High Priest Kirder for heresy and for challenging the fundamentalist ruling priesthood and laws of the time. (“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” one might say.) But his reputation as an artist in Persia so endured that the great 16th-century miniaturist Behzad signed his works with the words: “In the line of Mani.”

The Farsi word for politics is siassat. Where most Western cultures use the word only sparingly in daily discourse, siassat is a word instilled into every Iranian’s psyche from birth. Given the vicissitudes of three millennia, Persians have come to view politics with caution, even suspicion; wave after wave of invaders from all directions has led to a certain fatalism, a sense that the country has too often been ready to surrender its freedom to despotism. Yet Iranians’ taste for high culture — for poetry, art, calligraphy, and architecture — has sustained their nation through its darkest hours. So it has been during the political upheavals of the past three decades since the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Islamic Republic.

Western artistic methods were first introduced in Iran at the turn of the 20th century by Kamal al-Mulk, an enterprising Iranian court artist sent to European art academies in Florence, Rome, Paris, and Vienna to acquire new skills and then modernize the Iranian cultural scene. Up to that point, Persian art was based around the two-dimensional linear depictions of miniature painting. Kamal-al-Mulk’s most enduring legacy was the Madrasa-i-Sanayi-Mustazrafa, the country’s first modern art institute, which trained many Iranian artists in the first half of the 20th century in both the techniques and the aesthetics of Western art. Growing in fits and starts, the modern art movement in Iran reached its apogee in the early 1970s under the patronage of the empress at that time, Farah Pahlavi. With the court’s active support, a large collection of Iranian and international modern and contemporary art was put together; today it is recognized worldwide as one of the great collections of the last half century. The collection was housed in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the first of its kind in the region, which was finished in 1977.

The 1979 Islamic Revolution put a stop to all this gharbzadeghi (“Westoxification”), with Ayatollah Khomeini’s bilious views quickly shutting down anything originating in the West. The art schools and academies were closed, and a more "popular" religious art, in the form of murals and politico-religious graffiti with its themes of Shi’ite martyrdom and the perennial battle between good and evil (with depictions of revolutionary heroism and battle scenes from the Iran-Iraq war) came to dominate. Just as the Russian Revolution produced Social Realism as an aesthetic narrative, so the Islamic Revolution reinforced the Sagakhaneh style of popular art. Originally based on epic portrayals of ancient heroes and demons painted on the walls of small tea houses and eateries, the movement converted its narrative wholly into religious themes.