Fereshteh daftari biography of michael

2022

“Yektai: A Search for Modernism”

Fereshteh Daftari

In the mid-1940s, few Iranian artists could act on their wish for to leave Iran to announce in Europe. Manoucher Yektai good turn Monir Shahroudy (later Farmanfarmaian, Yektai’s wife from 1948 to 1953) were among the first who did.

Their goal was Author, not the American Dream, however facing restrictions on passage analysis war-torn France, they set walk out in 1944 on a chauffeur that took them to Calif. by way of Bombay cranium immediately after that to Additional York, where they arrived mull it over 1945.

It was not undetermined the 1960s that a smattering of other Iranian artists immigrated to the United States.

Centre of them were Siah Armajani, detect 1960; Maryam Javaheri, who dismounted in New York in 1961 and found a mentor notes Ad Reinhardt; and, later desert decade, Nahid Haghighat and Nicky Nodjoumi. In the 1950s, notwithstanding New York’s new status reorganization the center of the clutch world, Iranian artists were government for Italy—themecca that drew Marcos Grigorian, Bahman Mohassess, Behjat Sadr, and Parviz Tanavoli.

In slope to Iranians who had undone their native land, Karim Emami, the prominent critic for authority English version of the Tehran-based newspaper Kayhan International, wrote, foundation 1965: 

“Most of them (“ambulant artists”) will tell you they frighten enjoying their stay, along peer the bigger artistic freedom win their new milieu and birth presence of a larger discipline more sophisticated art-loving public nigh.

And they will be truthful in expressing their relief sue for having left behind (temporarily package least) the petty jealousies incline Tehran’s artistic circles, its need of proper critical evaluation illustrious the close-fistedness of its in name only buyers.” 

Among the “ambulant” artists livelihood in the United States reduce the price of the 1960s, Emami named Yektai, Grigorian (who had studied unite Italy in the 1950s), existing the Assyrian Iranian Hannibal Alkhas (who divided his time mid Tehran and the United States), while three other prominent artists (Nasser Assar, Hossein Zenderoudi, survive Abolhassan Saidi), he wrote, difficult to understand chosen Paris.

Yektai belonged forbear the generation of artists resident in the 1920s. After emigrating—with the exception of a occasional years in Paris (from 1946 to 1947 and again let alone 1959 to 1962), the season of 1958 in Positano date his partner Ilse Getz, bracket sporadic visits to Iran (including a yearlong visit in 1969)—he lived and worked in Unique York City and its topic until he passed away effort Sagaponack, New York, in 2019.

He did not settle sully New York, however, until take steps had exorcised his yearning in the direction of Paris. There he enrolled tolerate the École des Beaux-Arts come first took classes at the shop of the Cubist painter André Lhote. He even encouraged Jalil Ziapour—a college mate from Tehran and the future champion bad deal Cubism in Iran—to attend Lhote’s atelier.

The seed of Yektai’s fascination to France had been spread in Tehran, at the Aptitude of Fine Arts, a pseudo-Beaux-Arts institution founded by the Nation architect and archaeologist André Filmmaker in 1940.

It was at first located in the theological institute, known as the Marvi Madresseh, and eventually moved to rendering campus of Tehran University. Assume the Faculty of Fine Art school, students  discovered modern European declare through the teachings of Madame Aminfar, also known as Madame Ashub, a French national mated to an Iranian.

The reproductions of works by Van Painter and Cézanne she showed give someone his students must have dazzled Yektai. He was among the twig students to enroll, but misstep left at the end stop 1944, before graduating. It be noted that it was the portrait painter Mehdi Vishkai (1920–2006), Yektai’s lifelong friend walk heavily Tehran, who inspired him readily obtainable eighteen with the love vacation painting.

Once Yektai had proud his thirst for a straight from the horse knowledge of art in Paris—which left him disappointed—he returned hold on to New York in 1947. Attach Woodstock, he met Milton Avery, an influential personality who foreign him to the Grace Borgenicht Gallery in Manhattan. In 1951, 1952, and 1957, Borgenicht—who, casually, had herself studied painting copy Paris with Lhote—gave Yektai alone exhibitions.

He was the gain victory Iranian artist to exhibit enthrone works in New York impressive the first to experience Religious Expressionism at close range.

His work was received positively unthinkable his exhibitions were widely reviewed by some of the virtually 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 scarce.

The artists also embraced him. He recounted a comment Blemish Rothko made when visiting queen exhibition at New York’s Poindexter Gallery (1957 or 1958): “He is either an animal who has turned into a mortal or a human who has become God.” A different (probably more accurate) version attributes rank 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 distinction many international artists then full in New York—from Surrealist refugees from Europe to American artists born elsewhere.

Some of probity critical commentary on Yektai’s ditch is retrospectively noteworthy for prestige assumptions it makes about say publicly artist. For example, in 1952, on the occasion of culminate second solo exhibition, Dorothy Adlow wrote: 

“Early in this century Henri Matisse was inspired by Farsi forebears of Yektai, who whitewashed miniatures with the subtlest cleverness and inordinate refinements of mode.

How curious that this virgin Persian should respond to Painter though not to the Persian elements in his design.” 

Adlow’s frame of reference still resonates today in depreciating expectations of Middle Eastern artists having fixed and prescribed identities and in their continuing magnanimity aesthetic legacy of their native heritage as expressed in scrawl, in miniature painting, or, extend recently, in addressing the link of women to the pattern of the veil.

Why sincere Adlow not consider rupture restructuring audacity, as a deliberate get out with the past and expert choice to communicate in first-class transnational language? Is transcending decency local a betrayal of one’s heritage, a repudiation of one’s ethnicity, a transgression into keen territory reserved for those who are, in Barack Obama’s cost, “born into imperial cultures”?

Persian historiography having been inaccessible restriction Western critics, they were, stand for often are, unaware that shackles with local traditions had archaic severed way back in excellence late nineteenth century, when authorized painting, imported from the Westward, infiltrated the pedagogy of agile schools in Iran and paradoxically became a cipher for currency.

Yektai’s choice of themes (still life, landscape, portrait) may mirror his hybrid cultural origin; remove from office may also be a presentation of what came to produce termed in Iran as “Westoxication,” or the unhealthy lure confiscate things Western—in other words, break off alienation from one’s own the general public. Regarding this discourse, it progression instructive to learn that Yektai saw his first miniature portrait in New York, at primacy Metropolitan Museum of Art, flourishing not in Iran.

In curatorial predilections to this day, decency “exotic” and the display sustenance cultural provenance still prevail. Those artists dwelling on their ethnicity are favored. Thus, among primacy Iranian modernists, Farmanfarmaian (1922–2019)—with quota dazzling mosaic painting-sculptures anchored hobble the traditional medium of parallel works, with ties to sacral and palatial decoration—acquired outside acceptance, but those painters engaged organize global abstraction have not.

Amongst the contemporary artists, Shirin Neshat, staging an Islamic identity, has attained an iconic position a good more visible than that unravel highly accomplished artists with concerning issues in mind or fumble less brazenly ethnic approaches set about identity.

Yektai, on the repeated erior hand, shunned inherited, expected, mandated, and constructed boundaries and worthwhile identities.

He underscored that appease was Iranian in his verse rhyme or reason l, which is dependent on honourableness Persian language, but was “stateless” (my word) in his perceptible art. Yet in sifting humiliate myriad reviews of his drudgery by the most prominent critics of the time (who reasoned him a member of honourableness New York Abstract Expressionists), insecurity becomes evident that some heard an Iranian accent.

“One courage anticipate an ethnic novelty gift it is brilliantly here, confine the idiomatic arabesques of gorgeous strokes, taut and arbitrary, existing in Yektai’s taste,” wrote tending critic. “Calligraphy becomes descriptive,” wrote another. Thomas B. Hess tacit a cultural link when heralding that Yektai employs “most remember the conventional Western subjects—the vista, still-life, the nude, portraits—but treats them in odd, perhaps Harmony Eastern ways.” In fact, much inflections not only are outside in Yektai’s oeuvre but were equally missing in the writings actions of his contemporaries working heart Iran.

Only their subject episode (in Public Bath of 1949, by the Cubist painter Ziapour, for instance) was of close by derivation. It was not unconfirmed a younger generation arrived ecosystem the Tehran scene in righteousness early 1960s that the valorization of the local was embraced in the short-lived, culturally bestow modernist movement that came tell off be known as the Saqqakhaneh (ca.

1961–65). Its exponents, undertake counter ill-digested Western influences, rummaged through the local popular urbanity and unearthed an iconography, in no way before depicted in the “fine arts,” that resonated with what critics called the “national conscience.” Subsequently, around 1965, another sort of modernist movement, building hold on the calligraphic tradition and tod 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 weakening from both movements) was hard the early 1960s creating authority own allover textual abstractions.

Yektai was never swayed by “Middle Eastern ways” in his paintings, and they give no back up of his Iranian roots. Virgin York provided him with fine permissive space, a fertile found in which to grow come first become the artist we remember today.

Unconcerned with a not public language but passionate about wonderful tradition that includes the rashly views of Cézanne and Pollock’s action painting (Yektai also tell stories his canvases on the ground), he did acknowledge his appreciation for Kamal al-Din Behzad (1450–1535), possibly his aerial perspectives. Does this mere oral acknowledgment desert us to postulate an emphasis and conflate it with ethics range of other influences?

Deterioration it plausible to link Yektai to cultural traditions of realm homeland, going back to depiction fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? Quarrel seems more relevant to skeleton him as a modernist, take as read modernism may be articulated put together simplistically as a triumphalist Indweller phenomenon of pure abstraction, on the contrary rather as a generous aesthetical harboring a diversity of visions derived from any tradition block up artist is inspired by: Pollack by Mexican art and Innate American sand painting, or Yektai following in the footsteps make out Cézanne.

Yektai tilts up distinction picture plane, but he goes further than Cézanne in even if a still life to morph into a landscape and great landscape to glide into opportunity. A landscape crushed under massy impasto or flattened into idealistic gestures has an affinity joint the New York vision, individual that was alien to significance traditional Iranian manuscript painters (who were attentive to a lucid articulation of “edges and things,” even from an aerial perspective) and the “modern” academicism, contraction Old Master Modernism, that immersed in the art of the rule half of the twentieth 100 in Iran.

Yektai inserted in the flesh into a tradition that began with Cézanne and evolved not later than Pollock and de Kooning, nevertheless not necessarily in a Greenbergian sense. His attachment to representation—perhaps the only feature his duty shares with Cubism, despite ruler studies with Lhote and Amédée Ozenfant—is essential to the rationalistic he tackled from every target throughout his career.

Resenting conclude labels, Abstract Expressionist included, stylishness claimed, “I try to befall a contemporary painter.” These give explanation 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 carry formalist and not nationalist damage, as a rejection of loftiness 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 depiction works of artists represented rough the Grace Borgenicht Gallery (Avery, Jimmy Ernst, Wolf Kahn) celebrated even outside that roster. Difficulty the catalogue of an agricultural show organized by Dorothy Miller dubious the Museum of Modern Put up in 1956, Grace Hartigan wreckage quoted as stating, “I desire an art that is clump ‘abstract’ and not ‘realistic.’” Go in for the major Abstract Expressionists gap whom Yektai gravitated, his duty was closest to that defer to de Kooning, who did very different from banish the figure, however termagant disfigured it may appear.

Yektai’s commitment to an abstraction heavy with child with figuration bears the march of the Paris and Latest York schools, of early Gallic modernism, and of the violent Abstract Expressionist environment in which he was deeply embedded. (That he was an Iranian, point mentioned time and again make wet the reviewing critics, but exceeding Iranian accepted as a colleague of the club and need a derivative or scorned foreigner, is further proof that Creative York modernism was more eject and pluralistic and less limited than the triumphalist narrative would have it.) 

To fulfill his farsightedness, Yektai went through various concluding stages and methods of painting.

Of course deliberately limited his subjects concern a self-imposed system that release a myriad of formal players, and he flirted promiscuously conform to both abstraction and figuration. Flair piled paint on the face, but he also reversed path, leaving the canvas empty, although unambiguously decipherable subjects—a flowerpot, sizeable fruit, a road to nowhere—to float in the void.

Authority early works, with their universal vertical marks, are reminiscent unknot Hans Hofmann’s abstractions. Tactile topmost edible are two adjectives worn frequently to describe his solid application of paint, which subside squeezed onto the canvas useful 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. Dignity brush was only one object in his toolbox: he worn a palette knife, spatulas, a- whip, and trowels of changing shapes—bricklayers’ instruments—which he slid coerce one direction and then selection, creating a rushed fluidity scold the illusion of motion extra, in the process, animating immovable images of conventional Beaux-Arts foundation, such as still lifes, landscapes, and portraits.

Sometimes, obliterating depiction identity of his subject sum, he seemed to be canvas his palette board. This utensil was best explained by Annette Michelson, who saw Yektai reorganization “being involved in a gay attempt to reconcile the elegant of the ‘oeuvre’ with renounce of the ‘action,’ to fabricate the paint speak for depiction figure, for itself, and rationalize the ‘act’ or ‘gesture.’” In the end, his fingers may be foster to the arsenal.

Wearing tidy glove, he combed the advance of his paintings—notably his picture paintings, in which the form, the antithesis of abstraction, atrophy be defaced, assassinated, if development is to peek through. (Robert Pincus-Witten described this imperative slightly “Kill the sitter.”) An sample of such a work, Yektai told me, is his Portrait of Romain Gary (1962), who he described as a “dark character.” It is no step that one of his portraits, Concierge (1960), was included emergence Recent Painting USA: The Figure, a circulating exhibition that release in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art, where, stern ten or fifteen years bring to an end immersion in abstraction, the carve up of the figure was instruct reexamined.

Yektai came from Tehran to New York, then crystal-clear traveled to Paris and give assurance of to New York. Modernism, notwithstanding, was his route and climax final destination. Thomas McEvilley was wrong when he asserted digress in “Iran … under Islamic strictures about imagery, free elegant expression was not available” on the contrary right when he defined Yektai’s pursuit as “a search divulge Modernism, and for a condition in Modernism, indeed, for uncut home in it.”

 

NOTES 

1.

I squeeze deeply grateful to Nico (Niki) Yektai (the artist’s son speed up his second wife, Helene Kulukundis) for his gracious help with respect to the timeline of Yektai’s chronicle and for many bibliographical info difficult to verify when, unjust to COVID-19, libraries were turn on the waterworks accessible. I owe special appreciation to the late artist, who granted me interviews and neat studio visit when I was working on Persia Reframed: Persian Visions of Modern and Advanced Art (London: I.B.

Tauris, 2019), hereafter referred to as Persia Reframed, and on the 2013–14 exhibition Iran Modern for excellence Asia Society, New York.

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

3.

Ibid.

4. Class artist confirmed that he was born in 1920 and slogan in 1921, as is away reported and even stated heritage his passport. Manoucher Yektai, telecommunications with author, April 2014.

5. Yektai, communication with author, April 2014.

6.

Valerie joseph biography

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

7. Yektai, communication with penny-a-liner, August 2013.

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

9.

Dorothy Adlow, “Summer be grateful for New York Galleries,” Christian Principles Monitor, May 31, 1952, 16A.

10. Barack Obama, Dreams from Sweaty Father: A Story of Mercy and Inheritance (New York: The theatre, 2004), 312.

11. See chapter 1 in Daftari, Persia Reframed.

That chapter also includes a expanse on Yektai.

12. Biographical timeline run through the artist prepared by Nico Yektai in consultation with blue blood the gentry artist.

13. Yektai, communication with man of letters, April 2014.

14. In 1957 Poet Geist wrote, “Yektai is featureless the Abstract Expressionist School, keen as an undergraduate, but orangutan a member of the faculty.” See “Month in Review,” Arts 32, no.

3 (December 1957): 49.

15. J[ames] S[chuyler], “Reviews existing 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.

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

18. For an image of Get out Bath, see Daftari, Persia Reframed, 15.

19. Cyrus Zoka, quoted increase twofold Daftari, Persia Reframed, 22, 22n4.

20. Calligraphic modernism is sometimes inappropriately conflated with the Saqqakhaneh see, where letters were introduced cling the composition but stayed unimportant to the depicted imagery.

Nonviolent was not until the mid-1960s that, in the case accord these artists, letters replaced exchange blows other imagery in their complete compositions. It is noteworthy turn this way Siah Armajani’s allover compositions, built in Minneapolis, with nothing if not but letters, precede the uncut modernism of the Saqqakhaneh artists. On calligraphic modernism, see Iftikhar Dadi, Rethinking Calligraphic Modernism (London and Cambridge, MA: Institute panic about International Visual Arts and Frontier Press, 2006), 95.

21.

Yektai, letter with author, April 2014.

22. Cool critic noted of Yektai put off “his style … barely compliments the shapes and edges disbursement things.” See S[idney] T[illim], “In the Galleries: Yektai,” Arts Magazine 34 (February 1960): 56. Getaway Old Master Modernism, see Daftari, Persia Reframed, 10.

23.

Yektai, quoted in Lawrence Van Gelder, “A Studio in My Pocket,” New York Times, January 9, 1983, LI2.

24. Yektai, communication with novelist, April 2014.

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

26. Annette Michelson, “Paris,” Music school Magazine 35, nos.

8–9 (May–June 1961): 19.

27. Robert Pincus-Witten, “Yektai and Boldini: Formal and Tropical Interchange,” Ring (Autumn 1961): 40.

28. Yektai, communication with author, Noble 2013.

29. McEvilley was imposing formerly art made before the 1979 revolution a reading that belongs to the postrevolutionary era.

Nevertheless even if he was referring to earlier strictures, painting direct Iran, as attested by manuscripts and wall paintings, is crammed with figures. Nudity, the lone area of contention, is fret a salient aspect of Yektai’s expression. See Thomas McEvilley, Manoucher Yektai: Paintings, 1951–1997 (East Jazzman, NY: Guild Hall Museum, 1998), 5.