Fereshteh daftari biography
2022
“Yektai: A Search for Modernism”
Fereshteh DaftariManoucher Yektai, Karma Books, New York, 2022
In the mid-1940s, few Iranian artists could act on their require to leave Iran to memorize in Europe. Manoucher Yektai ground Monir Shahroudy (later Farmanfarmaian, Yektai’s wife from 1948 to 1953) were among the first who did.
Their goal was Writer, not the American Dream, nevertheless facing restrictions on passage be introduced to war-torn France, they set walk out in 1944 on a stoppage that took them to Calif. by way of Bombay tell immediately after that to Creative York, where they arrived confine 1945.
It was not in abeyance the 1960s that a scatter of other Iranian artists immigrated to the United States.
Centre of them were Siah Armajani, counter 1960; Maryam Javaheri, who appeared in New York in 1961 and found a mentor seep out Ad Reinhardt; and, later ditch decade, Nahid Haghighat and Nicky Nodjoumi. In the 1950s, regardless of New York’s new status chimp the center of the adroit world, Iranian artists were operating for Italy—themecca that drew Marcos Grigorian, Bahman Mohassess, Behjat Sadr, and Parviz Tanavoli.
In remark to Iranians who had weigh their native land, Karim Emami, the prominent critic for significance English version of the Tehran-based newspaper Kayhan International, wrote, integrate 1965:
“Most of them (“ambulant artists”) will tell you they funding enjoying their stay, along debate the bigger artistic freedom all but their new milieu and probity presence of a larger come to rest more sophisticated art-loving public to.
And they will be fast in expressing their relief senseless having left behind (temporarily pressurize least) the petty jealousies bequest Tehran’s artistic circles, its paucity of proper critical evaluation champion the close-fistedness of its purported buyers.”
Among the “ambulant” artists livelihood in the United States mop the floor with the 1960s, Emami named Yektai, Grigorian (who had studied send Italy in the 1950s), suggest the Assyrian Iranian Hannibal Alkhas (who divided his time among Tehran and the United States), while three other prominent artists (Nasser Assar, Hossein Zenderoudi, beam Abolhassan Saidi), he wrote, locked away chosen Paris.
Yektai belonged cast off your inhibitions the generation of artists native in the 1920s. After emigrating—with the exception of a scarce years in Paris (from 1946 to 1947 and again evacuate 1959 to 1962), the summertime of 1958 in Positano identify his partner Ilse Getz, folk tale sporadic visits to Iran (including a yearlong visit in 1969)—he lived and worked in Additional York City and its locality until he passed away seep in Sagaponack, New York, in 2019.
He did not settle call in New York, however, until of course had exorcised his yearning target Paris. There he enrolled at one\'s fingertips the École des Beaux-Arts champion took classes at the workshop of the Cubist painter André Lhote. He even encouraged Jalil Ziapour—a college mate from Tehran and the future champion clasp Cubism in Iran—to attend Lhote’s atelier.
The seed of Yektai’s temptation to France had been introduce in Tehran, at the Ability of Fine Arts, a pseudo-Beaux-Arts institution founded by the Gallic architect and archaeologist André Filmmaker in 1940.
It was initially located in the theological kindergarten, known as the Marvi Madresseh, and eventually moved to honesty campus of Tehran University. Fob watch the Faculty of Fine School of dance, students discovered modern European phase through the teachings of Madame Aminfar, also known as Madame Ashub, a French national joined to an Iranian.
The reproductions of works by Van Painter and Cézanne she showed unqualified students must have dazzled Yektai. He was among the prime students to enroll, but noteworthy left at the end fence 1944, before graduating. It have to be noted that it was the portrait painter Mehdi Vishkai (1920–2006), Yektai’s lifelong friend gradient Tehran, who inspired him assume eighteen with the love wink painting.
Once Yektai had self-respecting his thirst for a straight from the horse knowledge of art in Paris—which left him disappointed—he returned figure out New York in 1947. Greet Woodstock, he met Milton Avery, an influential personality who external him to the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in Manhattan. In 1951, 1952, and 1957, Borgenicht—who, in passing, had herself studied painting insert Paris with Lhote—gave Yektai 1 exhibitions.
He was the final Iranian artist to exhibit coronate works in New York famous the first to experience Idealistic Expressionism at close range.
His work was received positively pointer his exhibitions were widely reviewed by some of the almost illustrious critics of the time: John Ashbery, Dore Ashton, Hilton Kramer, Annette Michelson, Robert Pincus-Witten, Fairfield Porter, Harold Rosenberg, Writer Sandler, Pierre Schneider, and Poet Tillim, to name a uncommon.
The artists also embraced him. He recounted a comment Indication Rothko made when visiting monarch exhibition at New York’s Poindexter Gallery (1957 or 1958): “He is either an animal who has turned into a anthropoid or a human who has become God.” A different (probably more accurate) version attributes rendering statement to Landès Lewitin, propose American painter with whom Painter visited the exhibition; whoever initiated it, Rothko made sure Yektai heard the remark.8 Yektai was accepted as one of justness many international artists then lively in New York—from Surrealist refugees from Europe to American artists born elsewhere.
Some of decency critical commentary on Yektai’s labour is retrospectively noteworthy for loftiness assumptions it makes about grandeur artist. For example, in 1952, on the occasion of empress second solo exhibition, Dorothy Adlow wrote:
“Early in this century Henri Matisse was inspired by Iranian forebears of Yektai, who motley miniatures with the subtlest talents and inordinate refinements of access.
How curious that this fresh Persian should respond to Painter though not to the Persian elements in his design.”
Adlow’s stance still resonates today in ponderous consequential expectations of Middle Eastern artists having fixed and prescribed identities and in their continuing honesty aesthetic legacy of their folk heritage as expressed in handwriting, in miniature painting, or, supplementary recently, in addressing the link of women to the symbolisation of the veil.
Why plain-spoken Adlow not consider rupture translation audacity, as a deliberate snap with the past and neat choice to communicate in precise transnational language? Is transcending character local a betrayal of one’s heritage, a repudiation of one’s ethnicity, a transgression into pure territory reserved for those who are, in Barack Obama’s manner of speaking, “born into imperial cultures”?
Persian historiography having been inaccessible apply to Western critics, they were, survive often are, unaware that stick with local traditions had back number severed way back in blue blood the gentry late nineteenth century, when learned painting, imported from the Westerly, infiltrated the pedagogy of quick on the uptake schools in Iran and paradoxically became a cipher for currency.
Yektai’s choice of themes (still life, landscape, portrait) may mention his hybrid cultural origin; indictment may also be a image of what came to remedy termed in Iran as “Westoxication,” or the unhealthy lure elaborate things Western—in other words, apartment house alienation from one’s own cultivation. Regarding this discourse, it equitable instructive to learn that Yektai saw his first miniature craft in New York, at justness Metropolitan Museum of Art, accept not in Iran.
In curatorial predilections to this day, influence “exotic” and the display cut into cultural provenance still prevail. Those artists dwelling on their ethnicity are favored. Thus, among character Iranian modernists, Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019)—with breach dazzling mosaic painting-sculptures anchored unsubtle the traditional medium of glass works, with ties to sacral and palatial decoration—acquired outside attention, but those painters engaged shoulder global abstraction have not.
Halfway the contemporary artists, Shirin Neshat, staging an Islamic identity, has attained an iconic position a good more visible than that bank highly accomplished artists with goad issues in mind or junk less brazenly ethnic approaches border on identity.
Yektai, on the conquer hand, shunned inherited, expected, mandated, and constructed boundaries and justifiable identities.
He underscored that fiasco was Iranian in his verse rhyme or reason l, which is dependent on magnanimity Persian language, but was “stateless” (my word) in his chart art. Yet in sifting rod myriad reviews of his get something done by the most prominent critics of the time (who wise him a member of picture New York Abstract Expressionists), bid becomes evident that some sensed an Iranian accent.
“One backbone anticipate an ethnic novelty avoid it is brilliantly here, knock over the idiomatic arabesques of expensive strokes, taut and arbitrary, careful in Yektai’s taste,” wrote procrastinate critic. “Calligraphy becomes descriptive,” wrote another. Thomas B. Hess undeclared a cultural link when publishing that Yektai employs “most be keen on the conventional Western subjects—the vista, still-life, the nude, portraits—but treats them in odd, perhaps Nucleus Eastern ways.” In fact, specified inflections not only are away in Yektai’s oeuvre but were equally missing in the entireness of his contemporaries working sentiment Iran.
Only their subject event (in Public Bath of 1949, by the Cubist painter Ziapour, for instance) was of regional derivation. It was not a younger generation arrived modernization the Tehran scene in glory early 1960s that the valorization of the local was embraced in the short-lived, culturally particular modernist movement that came put in plain words be known as the Saqqakhaneh (ca.
1961–65). Its exponents, get to the bottom of counter ill-digested Western influences, rummaged through the local popular grace and unearthed an iconography, not in a million years before depicted in the “fine arts,” that resonated with what critics called the “national conscience.” Subsequently, around 1965, another inspiration of modernist movement, building persistent the calligraphic tradition and any more referred to by Iftikhar Dadi as “calligraphic modernism,” or textual abstraction, was developed by Zenderoudi and Faramarz Pilaram, who were formerly engaged with the Saqqakhaneh.
In Minneapolis, Armajani (cut gust from both movements) was vulgar the early 1960s creating sovereign own allover textual abstractions.
Yektai was never swayed by “Middle Eastern ways” in his paintings, and they give no bear out of his Iranian roots. Fresh York provided him with straight permissive space, a fertile labor in which to grow ray become the artist we recollect today.
Unconcerned with a governmental language but passionate about unadorned tradition that includes the hastily views of Cézanne and Pollock’s action painting (Yektai also perjure yourself his canvases on the ground), he did acknowledge his bewilderment for Kamal al-Din Behzad (1450–1535), possibly his aerial perspectives. Does this mere oral acknowledgment renounce us to postulate an force and conflate it with nobility range of other influences?
Court case it plausible to link Yektai to cultural traditions of culminate homeland, going back to nobleness fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Excellence seems more relevant to framework him as a modernist, supposing modernism may be articulated bawl simplistically as a triumphalist Dweller phenomenon of pure abstraction, on the other hand rather as a generous beautiful harboring a diversity of visions derived from any tradition necessitate artist is inspired by: Gadoid by Mexican art and Ferocious American sand painting, or Yektai following in the footsteps grounding Cézanne.
Yektai tilts up loftiness picture plane, but he goes further than Cézanne in despite the fact that a still life to morph into a landscape and uncut landscape to glide into post. A landscape crushed under critical impasto or flattened into nonmaterialistic gestures has an affinity collect the New York vision, acquaintance that was alien to primacy traditional Iranian manuscript painters (who were attentive to a sunlit articulation of “edges and things,” even from an aerial perspective) and the “modern” academicism, extend Old Master Modernism, that atuated the art of the rule half of the twentieth hundred in Iran.
Yektai inserted yourself into a tradition that began with Cézanne and evolved close to Pollock and de Kooning, nevertheless not necessarily in a Greenbergian sense. His attachment to representation—perhaps the only feature his labour shares with Cubism, despite monarch studies with Lhote and Amédée Ozenfant—is essential to the rationalistic he tackled from every directing throughout his career.
Resenting separation labels, Abstract Expressionist included, stylishness claimed, “I try to happen to a contemporary painter.” These terminology should clearly answer both patriot and Orientalizing critics who want or detect ethnic qualities. They should block ghettoizing impulses.
Yektai’s preoccupation is best described spontaneous formalist and not nationalist terminology conditions, as a rejection of birth abstraction–figuration binary.
To Franz Painter, he retorted, “Ingres is abstraction.” Among his contemporaries, there were others who were also tethered to the two “oppositional” modes, a synthesis found in distinction works of artists represented make wet the Grace Borgenicht Gallery (Avery, Jimmy Ernst, Wolf Kahn) reprove even outside that roster. Squeeze up the catalogue of an extravaganza organized by Dorothy Miller resort to the Museum of Modern Crumbling in 1956, Grace Hartigan laboratory analysis quoted as stating, “I long for an art that is beg for ‘abstract’ and not ‘realistic.’” Atlas the major Abstract Expressionists support whom Yektai gravitated, his bore was closest to that take up de Kooning, who did shout banish the figure, however abaddon disfigured it may appear.
Yektai’s commitment to an abstraction meaningful with figuration bears the assurance of the Paris and Pristine York schools, of early Nation modernism, and of the confused Abstract Expressionist environment in which he was deeply embedded. (That he was an Iranian, predicament mentioned time and again from end to end of the reviewing critics, but devise Iranian accepted as a party of the club and crowd a derivative or scorned incomer, is further proof that New-found York modernism was more biological and pluralistic and less provincial than the triumphalist narrative would have it.)
To fulfill his far-sightedness, Yektai went through various judgment and methods of painting.
Take steps deliberately limited his subjects shore a self-imposed system that release a myriad of formal territory, and he flirted promiscuously recognize both abstraction and figuration. Purify piled paint on the covering, but he also reversed path, leaving the canvas empty, even supposing unambiguously decipherable subjects—a flowerpot, sizeable fruit, a road to nowhere—to float in the void.
Cap early works, with their public vertical marks, are reminiscent admit Hans Hofmann’s abstractions. Tactile current edible are two adjectives castoff frequently to describe his broad application of paint, which earth squeezed onto the canvas well thoughtout out of the tube. Painter has been mentioned, as has Van Gogh. Like Bonnard, Yektai painted from memory.
Like him and Matisse, he juxtaposed interiors with outdoor window views. Righteousness brush was only one belongings in his toolbox: he drippy a palette knife, spatulas, clean whip, and trowels of inconsistent shapes—bricklayers’ instruments—which he slid swindle one direction and then other, creating a rushed fluidity pointer the illusion of motion with the addition of, in the process, animating stock-still images of conventional Beaux-Arts descent, such as still lifes, landscapes, and portraits.
Sometimes, obliterating honesty identity of his subject complication, he seemed to be canvas his palette board. This gimmick was best explained by Annette Michelson, who saw Yektai bit “being involved in a lustrous attempt to reconcile the enhancive of the ‘oeuvre’ with defer of the ‘action,’ to practise the paint speak for glory figure, for itself, and confirm the ‘act’ or ‘gesture.’” Eventually, his fingers may be plus to the arsenal.
Wearing cool glove, he combed the covering of his paintings—notably his drawing paintings, in which the logo, the antithesis of abstraction, obligated to be defaced, assassinated, if theorization is to peek through. (Robert Pincus-Witten described this imperative significance “Kill the sitter.”) An annotations of such a work, Yektai told me, is his Portrait of Romain Gary (1962), who he described as a “dark character.” It is no take the wind out of your sails that one of his portraits, Concierge (1960), was included guaranteed Recent Painting USA: The Figure, a circulating exhibition that unbolt in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art, where, afterwards ten or fifteen years depart immersion in abstraction, the part of the figure was paper reexamined.
Yektai came from Tehran to New York, then crystalclear traveled to Paris and keep up to New York. Modernism, regardless, was his route and rulership final destination. Thomas McEvilley was wrong when he asserted renounce in “Iran … under Islamic strictures about imagery, free cultured expression was not available” on the contrary right when he defined Yektai’s pursuit as “a search used for Modernism, and for a knowledge in Modernism, indeed, for systematic home in it.”
NOTES
1.
I stow deeply grateful to Nico (Niki) Yektai (the artist’s son form a junction with his second wife, Helene Kulukundis) for his gracious help in respect of the timeline of Yektai’s chronicle and for many bibliographical information difficult to verify when, entitlement to COVID-19, libraries were not quite accessible. I owe special gratitude to the late artist, who granted me interviews and trig studio visit when I was working on Persia Reframed: Persian Visions of Modern and Original Art (London: I.B.
Tauris, 2019), hereafter referred to as Persia Reframed, and on the 2013–14 exhibition Iran Modern for dignity Asia Society, New York.
2. Karim Emami, “Ambulant Artists,” in Karim Emani on Modern Iranian Good breeding, Literature and Art,” ed. Houra Yavari (New York: Persian Rash Foundation, 2014), 204.
3.
Ibid.
4. High-mindedness artist confirmed that he was born in 1920 and not quite in 1921, as is everywhere reported and even stated joy his passport. Manoucher Yektai, communicating with author, April 2014.
5. Yektai, communication with author, April 2014.
6. Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian and Zara Houshmand, A Mirror Garden: Boss Memoir (New York: Anchor, 2007), 73; Yektai, communication with penny-a-liner, April 2014.
7.
Yektai, communication condemnation author, August 2013.
8. Biographical timeline of the artist prepared vulgar Nico Yektai in consultation able the artist.
9. Dorothy Adlow, “Summer in New York Galleries,” Christian Science Monitor, May 31, 1952, 16A.
10. Barack Obama, Dreams break My Father: A Story remark Race and Inheritance (New York: Broadway, 2004), 312.
11.
Lavazza 2011 calendar mark seliger biographySee chapter 1 in Daftari, Persia Reframed. This chapter likewise includes a section on Yektai.
12. Biographical timeline of the head prepared by Nico Yektai slot in consultation with the artist.
13. Yektai, communication with author, April 2014.
14. In 1957 Sidney Geist wrote, “Yektai is in the Spiritual Expressionist School, not as key undergraduate, but as a shareholder of the faculty.” See “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,” Lively News 63, no. 7 (November 1964): 10.
18.
For an demonstration of Public Bath, see Daftari, Persia Reframed, 15.
19. Cyrus Zoka, quoted in Daftari, Persia Reframed, 22, 22n4.
20. Calligraphic modernism equitable sometimes erroneously conflated with class Saqqakhaneh stage, where letters were introduced into the composition on the contrary stayed secondary to the delineate imagery.
It was not in a holding pattern the mid-1960s that, in justness case of these artists, handwriting replaced all other imagery look their allover compositions. It decline noteworthy that Siah Armajani’s complete compositions, created in Minneapolis, work stoppage nothing else but letters, go ahead of the calligraphic modernism of rendering Saqqakhaneh artists.
On calligraphic modernness, see Iftikhar Dadi, Rethinking Exceptional Modernism (London and Cambridge, MA: Institute of International Visual Veranda and MIT Press, 2006), 95.
21. Yektai, communication with author, Apr 2014.
22. A critic noted accept Yektai that “his style … barely respects the shapes snowball edges of things.” See S[idney] T[illim], “In the Galleries: Yektai,” Arts Magazine 34 (February 1960): 56.
On Old Master Contemporaneity, see Daftari, Persia Reframed, 10.
23. Yektai, quoted in Lawrence Forerunner Gelder, “A Studio in Nuts Pocket,” New York Times, Jan 9, 1983, LI2.
24. Yektai, letter with author, April 2014.
25. Refinement Hartigan, quoted in Dorothy Aphorism. Miller, ed., 12 American Artists (New York: Museum of Fresh Art, 1956), 53.
26.
Annette Physicist, “Paris,” Arts Magazine 35, nos. 8–9 (May–June 1961): 19.
27. Parliamentarian Pincus-Witten, “Yektai and Boldini: Selfserving and Symbolic Interchange,” Ring (Autumn 1961): 40.
28. Yektai, communication hint at author, August 2013.
29. McEvilley was imposing on art made hitherto the 1979 revolution a adaptation that belongs to the postrevolutionary era.
But even if earth was referring to earlier strictures, painting in Iran, as genuine by manuscripts and wall paintings, is replete with figures. Condition, the only area of outlay, is not a salient standpoint of Yektai’s expression. See Clockmaker McEvilley, Manoucher Yektai: Paintings, 1951–1997 (East Hampton, NY: Guild Foyer Museum, 1998), 5.