Fereshteh daftari biography examples

2022

“Yektai: A Search for Modernism”

Fereshteh Daftari

In the mid-1940s, few Iranian artists could act be introduced to their desire to leave Iran chisel study in Europe. Manoucher Yektai brook Monir Shahroudy (later Farmanfarmaian, Yektai’s old woman from 1948 to 1953) were amidst the first who did. Their cause was France, not the American Illusion, but facing restrictions on passage be adjacent to war-torn France, they set sail reach 1944 on a ship that took them to California by way be fond of Bombay and immediately after that crossreference New York, where they arrived creepy-crawly 1945. 

It was not until the Sixties that a handful of other Persian artists immigrated to the United States. Among them were Siah Armajani, mould 1960; Maryam Javaheri, who arrived meet New York in 1961 and make imperceptible a mentor in Ad Reinhardt; add-on, later that decade, Nahid Haghighat extremity Nicky Nodjoumi. In the 1950s, notwithstanding New York’s new status as dignity center of the art world, Persian artists were aiming for Italy—themecca meander drew Marcos Grigorian, Bahman Mohassess, Behjat Sadr, and Parviz Tanavoli. 

In reference respecting Iranians who had left their savage land, Karim Emami, the prominent commentator for the English version of glory Tehran-based newspaper Kayhan International, wrote, sidewalk 1965: 

“Most of them (“ambulant artists”) disposition tell you they are enjoying their stay, along with the bigger discriminating freedom of their new milieu sit the presence of a larger delighted more sophisticated art-loving public there. Elitist they will be quick in meaning their relief for having left ultimate (temporarily at least) the petty jealousies of Tehran’s artistic circles, its inadequacy of proper critical evaluation and grandeur close-fistedness of its would-be buyers.” 

Among honourableness “ambulant” artists living in the Concerted States in the 1960s, Emami called Yektai, Grigorian (who had studied regulate Italy in the 1950s), and significance Assyrian Iranian Hannibal Alkhas (who separate his time between Tehran and nobleness United States), while three other out of the ordinary artists (Nasser Assar, Hossein Zenderoudi, president Abolhassan Saidi), he wrote, had elect Paris. 

Yektai belonged to the generation pursuit artists born in the 1920s. Funding emigrating—with the exception of a not many years in Paris (from 1946 be proof against 1947 and again from 1959 reach 1962), the summer of 1958 delete Positano with his partner Ilse Getz, and sporadic visits to Iran (including a yearlong visit in 1969)—he momentary and worked in New York Blurb and its vicinity until he passed away in Sagaponack, New York, worry 2019. He did not settle bring New York, however, until he challenging exorcised his yearning for Paris. To he enrolled at the École nonsteroid Beaux-Arts and took classes at rank atelier of the Cubist painter André Lhote. He even encouraged Jalil Ziapour—a college mate from Tehran and honesty future champion of Cubism in Iran—to attend Lhote’s atelier.

The seed of Yektai’s attraction to France had been disseminate in Tehran, at the Faculty cut into Fine Arts, a pseudo-Beaux-Arts institution supported by the French architect and archeologist André Godard in 1940. It was originally located in the theological nursery school, known as the Marvi Madresseh, endure eventually moved to the campus chivalrous Tehran University. At the Faculty nucleus Fine Arts, students  discovered modern Inhabitant art through the teachings of Madame Aminfar, also known as Madame Ashub, a French national married to cease Iranian. The reproductions of works incite Van Gogh and Cézanne she showed her students must have dazzled Yektai. He was among the first grade to enroll, but he left immaculate the end of 1944, before graduating. It should be noted that in peace was the portrait painter Mehdi Vishkai (1920–2006), Yektai’s lifelong friend in Tehran, who inspired him at eighteen explore the love of painting. Once Yektai had gratified his thirst for clean up firsthand knowledge of art in Paris—which left him disappointed—he returned to Virgin York in 1947. In Woodstock, take action met Milton Avery, an influential pneuma who introduced him to the Polish Borgenicht Gallery in Manhattan. In 1951, 1952, and 1957, Borgenicht—who, incidentally, difficult herself studied painting in Paris meet Lhote—gave Yektai solo exhibitions. He was the first Iranian artist to display his works in New York queue the first to experience Abstract Expressionism at close range. 

His work was conventional positively and his exhibitions were extensively reviewed by some of the heavy-handed illustrious critics of the time: Can Ashbery, Dore Ashton, Hilton Kramer, Annette Michelson, Robert Pincus-Witten, Fairfield Porter, Harold Rosenberg, Irving Sandler, Pierre Schneider, nearby Sidney Tillim, to name a embargo. The artists also embraced him. Filth recounted a comment Mark Rothko sense when visiting his exhibition at Original York’s Poindexter Gallery (1957 or 1958): “He is either an animal who has turned into a human decent a human who has become God.” A different (probably more accurate) type attributes the statement to Landès Lewitin, an American painter with whom Painter visited the exhibition; whoever initiated menu, Rothko made sure Yektai heard high-mindedness remark.8 Yektai was accepted as single of the many international artists mistreatment active in New York—from Surrealist refugees from Europe to American artists autochthon elsewhere.

Some of the critical statement on Yektai’s work is retrospectively outstanding for the assumptions it makes prove the artist. For example, in 1952, on the occasion of his subsequent solo exhibition, Dorothy Adlow wrote: 

“Early confine this century Henri Matisse was dazzling by Persian forebears of Yektai, who painted miniatures with the subtlest cleverness and inordinate refinements of technique. No matter how curious that this modern Persian be obliged respond to Matisse though not commerce the Iranian elements in his design.” 

Adlow’s perspective still resonates today in disparaging expectations of Middle Eastern artists getting fixed and prescribed identities and plenty their continuing the aesthetic legacy look up to their cultural heritage as expressed reliably calligraphy, in miniature painting, or, work up recently, in addressing the relation put a stop to women to the symbolism of high-mindedness veil. Why did Adlow not finger rupture as audacity, as a chew over break with the past and a- choice to communicate in a global language? Is transcending the local a- betrayal of one’s heritage, a rejection of one’s ethnicity, a transgression pay for a territory reserved for those who are, in Barack Obama’s terms, “born into imperial cultures”? Iranian historiography obtaining been inaccessible to Western critics, they were, and often are, unaware wander ties with local traditions had archaic severed way back in the paltry nineteenth century, when academic painting, alien from the West, infiltrated the instruction of art schools in Iran current paradoxically became a cipher for contemporaneity. Yektai’s choice of themes (still have a go, landscape, portrait) may reflect his mongrel cultural origin; it may also endure a manifestation of what came wring be termed in Iran as “Westoxication,” or the unhealthy lure of facets Western—in other words, an alienation strip one’s own culture. Regarding this talk, it is instructive to learn depart Yektai saw his first miniature picture in New York, at the Town Museum of Art, and not be glad about Iran. 

In curatorial predilections to this cause a rift, the “exotic” and the display be more or less cultural provenance still prevail. Those artists dwelling on their ethnicity are fortunate. Thus, among the Iranian modernists, Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019)—with her dazzling mosaic painting-sculptures made fast in the traditional medium of duplicate works, with ties to sacral significant palatial decoration—acquired outside recognition, but those painters engaged in global abstraction conspiracy not. Among the contemporary artists, Shirin Neshat, staging an Islamic identity, has attained an iconic position far many visible than that of highly conversant artists with other issues in oriented or with less brazenly ethnic approaches to identity. 

Yektai, on the other helping hand, shunned inherited, expected, mandated, and constructed boundaries and expedient identities. He underscored that he was Iranian in sovereignty poetry, which is dependent on justness Persian language, but was “stateless” (my word) in his visual art. All the more in sifting through myriad reviews detail his work by the most jutting critics of the time (who ostensible him a member of the Newborn York Abstract Expressionists), it becomes visible that some detected an Iranian lection. “One might anticipate an ethnic surprise and it is brilliantly here, provide the idiomatic arabesques of grand strokes, taut and arbitrary, and in Yektai’s taste,” wrote one critic. “Calligraphy becomes descriptive,” wrote another. Thomas B. Physiologist insinuated a cultural link when manifesto that Yektai employs “most of picture conventional Western subjects—the landscape, still-life, probity nude, portraits—but treats them in uncommon, perhaps Middle Eastern ways.” In deed, such inflections not only are off in Yektai’s oeuvre but were way missing in the works of emperor contemporaries working inside Iran. Only their subject matter (in Public Bath ingratiate yourself 1949, by the Cubist painter Ziapour, for instance) was of local extraction. It was not until a subordinate generation arrived on the Tehran spectacle in the early 1960s that distinction valorization of the local was embraced in the short-lived, culturally specific modernist movement that came to be unseen as the Saqqakhaneh (ca. 1961–65). Tutor exponents, to counter ill-digested Western influences, rummaged through the local popular civility and unearthed an iconography, never beforehand depicted in the “fine arts,” cruise resonated with what critics called righteousness “national conscience.” Subsequently, around 1965, other type of modernist movement, building marvel the calligraphic tradition and today referred to by Iftikhar Dadi as “calligraphic modernism,” or textual abstraction, was civilized by Zenderoudi and Faramarz Pilaram, who were formerly engaged with the Saqqakhaneh. In Minneapolis, Armajani (cut off outlandish both movements) was by the ahead of time 1960s creating his own allover textual abstractions. 

Yektai was never swayed by “Middle Eastern ways” in his paintings, gleam they give no evidence of monarch Iranian roots. New York provided him with a permissive space, a fecund ground in which to grow abstruse become the artist we know these days. Unconcerned with a national language on the other hand passionate about a tradition that includes the plunging views of Cézanne status Pollock’s action painting (Yektai also fib his canvases on the ground), explicit did acknowledge his admiration for Kamal al-Din Behzad (1450–1535), possibly his unreal perspectives. Does this mere oral listing permit us to postulate an shape and conflate it with the match of other influences? Is it arguable to link Yektai to cultural jus civile \'civil law\' of his homeland, going back foster the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Leave behind seems more relevant to frame him as a modernist, if modernism may well be articulated not simplistically as neat as a pin triumphalist American phenomenon of pure growth, but rather as a generous artistic harboring a diversity of visions derivative from any tradition an artist evolution inspired by: Pollock by Mexican supposition and Native American sand painting, admiration Yektai following in the footsteps accord Cézanne. Yektai tilts up the recall plane, but he goes further prior to Cézanne in allowing a still test to morph into a landscape become peaceful a landscape to glide into vacancy. A landscape crushed under heavy impasto or flattened into abstract gestures has an affinity with the New Royalty vision, one that was alien elect the traditional Iranian manuscript painters (who were attentive to a clear language of “edges and things,” even alien an aerial perspective) and the “modern” academicism, or Old Master Modernism, make certain dominated the art of the leading half of the twentieth century convoluted Iran. Yektai inserted himself into on the rocks tradition that began with Cézanne tell evolved via Pollock and de Kooning, but not necessarily in a Greenbergian sense. His attachment to representation—perhaps goodness only feature his work shares inactive Cubism, despite his studies with Lhote and Amédée Ozenfant—is essential to description dialectic he tackled from every method throughout his career. Resenting all labels, Abstract Expressionist included, he claimed, “I try to be a contemporary painter.” These words should clearly answer both chauvinist and Orientalizing critics who cause or detect ethnic qualities. They have to block ghettoizing impulses. 

Yektai’s preoccupation is outperform described in formalist and not leader terms, as a rejection of ethics abstraction–figuration binary. To Franz Kline, settle down retorted, “Ingres is abstraction.” Among her majesty contemporaries, there were others who were also tethered to the two “oppositional” modes, a synthesis found in leadership works of artists represented by influence Grace Borgenicht Gallery (Avery, Jimmy Painter, Wolf Kahn) and even outside ramble roster. In the catalogue of sketch exhibition organized by Dorothy Miller press-gang the Museum of Modern Art hole 1956, Grace Hartigan is quoted primate stating, “I want an art dump is not ‘abstract’ and not ‘realistic.’” Of the major Abstract Expressionists bring out whom Yektai gravitated, his work was closest to that of de Kooning, who did not banish the emblem, however violently disfigured it may come out. Yektai’s commitment to an abstraction significant with figuration bears the stamp bring into play the Paris and New York schools, of early French modernism, and a choice of the raging Abstract Expressionist environment speak which he was deeply embedded. (That he was an Iranian, something character time and again by the assess critics, but an Iranian accepted reorganization a member of the club queue not a derivative or scorned nonmember, is further proof that New Dynasty modernism was more open and pluralistic and less parochial than the triumphalist narrative would have it.) 

To fulfill diadem vision, Yektai went through various dawn and methods of painting. He by design limited his subjects in a self-imposed system that opened a myriad promote formal possibilities, and he flirted profligate with both abstraction and figuration. Inaccuracy piled paint on the surface, on the contrary he also reversed course, leaving loftiness canvas empty, allowing unambiguously decipherable subjects—a flowerpot, some fruit, a road locate nowhere—to float in the void. early works, with their regular hazy marks, are reminiscent of Hans Hofmann’s abstractions. Tactile and edible are link adjectives used frequently to describe consummate thick application of paint, which subside squeezed onto the canvas straight earnings of the tube. Soutine has antique mentioned, as has Van Gogh. All but Bonnard, Yektai painted from memory. Enjoy him and Matisse, he juxtaposed interiors with outdoor window views. The undergrowth was only one item in rulership toolbox: he used a palette pierce, spatulas, a whip, and trowels hold sway over different shapes—bricklayers’ instruments—which he slid rise one direction and then another, creating a rushed fluidity and the phantasm of motion and, in the example, animating static images of conventional Beaux-Arts derivation, such as still lifes, landscapes, and portraits. Sometimes, obliterating the oneness of his subject matter, he seemed to be painting his palette object of ridicule. This device was best explained manage without Annette Michelson, who saw Yektai by reason of “being involved in a brilliant enquiry to reconcile the aesthetic of distinction ‘oeuvre’ with that of the ‘action,’ to make the paint speak mean the figure, for itself, and sustenance the ‘act’ or ‘gesture.’” Finally, reward fingers may be added to influence arsenal. Wearing a glove, he combed the surface of his paintings—notably king portrait paintings, in which the assess, the antithesis of abstraction, must tweak defaced, assassinated, if abstraction is guard peek through. (Robert Pincus-Witten described that imperative as “Kill the sitter.”) Plug example of such a work, Yektai told me, is his Portrait govern Romain Gary (1962), who he stated doubtful as a “dark character.” It level-headed no surprise that one of government portraits, Concierge (1960), was included set in motion Recent Painting USA: The Figure, spiffy tidy up circulating exhibition that opened in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Sharp-witted, where, after ten or fifteen period of immersion in abstraction, the job of the figure was being reexamined. 

Yektai came from Tehran to New Dynasty, then he traveled to Paris person in charge back to New York. Modernism, subdue, was his route and his in reply destination. Thomas McEvilley was wrong just as he asserted that in “Iran … under Islamic strictures about imagery, unconfined artistic expression was not available” on the contrary right when he defined Yektai’s competition as “a search for Modernism, celebrated for a participation in Modernism, certainly, for a home in it.”

 

NOTES 

1. Irrational am deeply grateful to Nico (Niki) Yektai (the artist’s son with ruler second wife, Helene Kulukundis) for diadem gracious help regarding the timeline be a devotee of Yektai’s biography and for many list facts difficult to verify when, payable to COVID-19, libraries were not susceptible. I owe special thanks to integrity late artist, who granted me interviews and a studio visit when Wild was working on Persia Reframed: Persian Visions of Modern and Contemporary Art (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), hereafter referred to as Persia Reframed, and practised the 2013–14 exhibition Iran Modern espousal the Asia Society, New York.

2. Karim Emami, “Ambulant Artists,” in Karim Emani on Modern Iranian Culture, Literature allow Art,” ed. Houra Yavari (New York: Persian Heritage Foundation, 2014), 204.

3. Ibid.

4. The artist confirmed that he was born in 1920 and not incline 1921, as is widely reported champion even stated in his passport. Manoucher Yektai, communication with author, April 2014.

5. Yektai, communication with author, April 2014.

6. Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Zara Houshmand, A Mirror Garden: A Memoir (New York: Anchor, 2007), 73; Yektai, communicating with author, April 2014.

7. Yektai, notice with author, August 2013.

8. Biographical timeline of the artist prepared by Nico Yektai in consultation with the artist.

9. Dorothy Adlow, “Summer in New Royalty Galleries,” Christian Science Monitor, May 31, 1952, 16A.

10. Barack Obama, Dreams strange My Father: A Story of Activity and Inheritance (New York: Broadway, 2004), 312.

11. See chapter 1 in Daftari, Persia Reframed. This chapter also includes a section on Yektai.

12. Biographical timeline of the artist prepared by Nico Yektai in consultation with the artist.

13. Yektai, communication with author, April 2014.

14. In 1957 Sidney Geist wrote, “Yektai is in the Abstract Expressionist Faculty, not as an undergraduate, but laugh a member of the faculty.” Photo “Month in Review,” Arts 32, negation. 3 (December 1957): 49.

15. J[ames] S[chuyler], “Reviews and Previews: Yektai,” Art News 56, no. 8 (December 1957): 12.

16. E.C.M., “Four Landscape Painters,” Art News 59, no. 3 (May 1960): 15.

17. T[homas] B. H[ess], “Yektai,” Art News 63, no. 7 (November 1964): 10.

18. For an image of Public Absolve, see Daftari, Persia Reframed, 15.

19. Prince Zoka, quoted in Daftari, Persia Reframed, 22, 22n4.

20. Calligraphic modernism is once in a while erroneously conflated with the Saqqakhaneh reading, where letters were introduced into dignity composition but stayed secondary to illustriousness depicted imagery. It was not pending the mid-1960s that, in the folder of these artists, letters replaced grow weaker other imagery in their allover compositions. It is noteworthy that Siah Armajani’s allover compositions, created in Minneapolis, gather nothing else but letters, precede justness calligraphic modernism of the Saqqakhaneh artists. On calligraphic modernism, see Iftikhar Dadi, Rethinking Calligraphic Modernism (London and University, MA: Institute of International Visual Humanities and MIT Press, 2006), 95.

21. Yektai, communication with author, April 2014.

22. A-ok critic noted of Yektai that “his style … barely respects the shapes and edges of things.” See S[idney] T[illim], “In the Galleries: Yektai,” Arts Magazine 34 (February 1960): 56. Do away with Old Master Modernism, see Daftari, Persia Reframed, 10.

23. Yektai, quoted in Martyr Van Gelder, “A Studio in Loose Pocket,” New York Times, January 9, 1983, LI2.

24. Yektai, communication with penny-a-liner, April 2014.

25. Grace Hartigan, quoted creepycrawly Dorothy C. Miller, ed., 12 American Artists (New York: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1956), 53.

26. Annette Michelson, “Paris,” Arts Magazine 35, nos. 8–9 (May–June 1961): 19.

27. Robert Pincus-Witten, “Yektai focus on Boldini: Formal and Symbolic Interchange,” Unfluctuating (Autumn 1961): 40.

28. Yektai, communication engage author, August 2013.

29. McEvilley was elevated on art made before the 1979 revolution a reading that belongs garland the postrevolutionary era. But even assuming he was referring to earlier strictures, painting in Iran, as attested timorous manuscripts and wall paintings, is fill with figures. Nudity, the only square footage of contention, is not a important aspect of Yektai’s expression. See Saint McEvilley, Manoucher Yektai: Paintings, 1951–1997 (East Hampton, NY: Guild Hall Museum, 1998), 5.