Exhibition, Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture

(http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/exhibits/iran/introduction/index.html)

Iranian Painting and Sculpture of the 1960s and '70s

Many of the artists featured in Between Word and Image were first introduced to American audiences by Abby Weed Grey, the founder of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Mrs. Grey, a Minnesota resident, was a passionate supporter of contemporary Middle Eastern and Asian art. As part of a trip around the world in 1960, she visited Iran. Over the next thirteen years, Mrs. Grey became the single most important foreign collector of Iranian modern art and her collection, which she donated to NYU in 1975, features works by many of the leading artists.

The 1960s and '70s were a time of a great artistic ferment in Iran, as elsewhere in the world. Many artists were actively exploring abstract modes of expression. Interestingly, centuries before modern artists in Europe and America turned to non-objective art, artistic traditions outside the West had eschewed realism. Beginning with Impressionism in the 1860s, avant-garde artists in Europe and America increasingly abandoned customary Western methods of representing visible reality, such as one-point perspective and the use of light and shade to create the illusion of volume. Many European and American artists turned eastward, looking to Japanese prints and Persian miniatures, as well as African sculpture, for inspiration. 

In the 1960s, Iranian artists were engaged in forging an aesthetic that was at once Iranian and modern. Drawing on materials and symbols in Persian culture, they infused them with new meanings. As Shiva Balaghi notes, modernity in the Iranian context was a complex field of negotiation and accommodation. Iranian modern artists were also working in an expanding institutional context. The Fine Arts Academy, which focused on architecture and painting, was established at the University of Tehran in 1940. The following year, as Allied forces occupied Iran, Reza Shah Pahlavi abdicated the throne to his young son. The period between 1941 and the 1953 coup that ousted Mohammad Mossadeq, the elected Prime Minister who nationalized the oil industry, was an era of unprecedented democracy. It was also a critical period in the development of Iranian modernism. Journals promoting modernist art and literature were published, and galleries dedicated to modern Iranian art were opened. As Fereshteh Daftari explains, during this period, some Iranian artists traveled to "Paris, Munich, or Istanbul, where they encountered a range of debates specific to the postwar era, then returned home with fragments of foreign vocabularies with which they attempted to describe local themes."

In 1954, Marcos Grigorian returned to Iran from Rome, where he had studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti.  Grigorian, who is included in the Grey Collection, was a key figure in the modern Iranian art scene. He opened the Galerie Esthétique, an important commercial gallery in Tehran. In 1958, under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, he organized the first Tehran Biennial. Grigorian was also an influential teacher at the Fine Arts Academy, where he disseminated his enthusiasm for local popular culture, including coffee-house paintings, a type of folk art named after the locations in which they were often displayed.

Hossein Zenderoudi, a student of Grigorian, likewise found great inspiration in coffee-house paintings. His imagination was fueled as well by other forms of Iranian popular culture—such as talismans that he encountered in the bazaars, and textiles he saw in the Iran Bastan Museum. As Daftari notes, he "established a fully developed syntax brewing a private mythology out of religion, superstition, augury, numerology, divination, and coded signs." Seeing some of Zenderoudi's paintings at the 1962 Tehran Biennial, Iranian art critic Karim Emami used the word saqqakhaneh, which denotes a ceremonial public fountain most often found in bazaars, to describe Zenderoudi's integration of populist themes from Iranian Shiite folk art with modern art forms. A former director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Kamran Diba, evocatively referred to this trend as Spiritual Pop Art: "There is a parallel between Saqqak-khaneh and Pop Art, if we simplify Pop Art as an art movement which looks at the symbols and tools of a mass consumer society as a relevant and influencing cultural force. Saqqak-khaneh artists looked at the inner beliefs and popular symbols that were part of the religion and culture of Iran, and perhaps, consumed in the same way as industrial products in the West." Zenderoudi's The Hand features calligraphy prominently and also references Shiite folklore.

Parviz Tanavoli is another of the most prominent saqqakhaneh artists and, like Zenderoudi, draws inspiration from both calligraphy and classical Persian poetry. In 1972 he made Heech, a bronze sculpture in the arching shapes of the Persian letters that spell out the word "nothing." With Heech, Tanavoli restated the importance of the written word as a form that is open to multiple interpretations. The following year, he produced Heech Tablet; its surface markings parody cuneiform inscriptions and recall the grillwork protecting Islamic religious structures. As Daftari explains, "Here ancient pre-Islamic inscriptions and the aura of Islamic religion are locked together in the expression of a continuous, undivided past." Through the years, Tanavoli developed a friendship with Abby Grey, who avidly collected his sculptures and lithographs. In addition to helping him establish a bronze foundry at the University of Tehran, she invited him to visit the United States, where he taught sculpture at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for a few years. Mrs. Grey also initiated a meeting between Tanavoli and another Iranian artist living in Minnesota, Siah Armajani. 

Armajani had moved to Minnesota to attend Macalester College, where his uncle was a professor.  He settled there permanently and became an American citizen. Best known today for his architectural constructions and public sculptures, Armajani draws inspiration from writings, including those of Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and reworks commonplace elements—such as walls, benches, windows, and doors—into complex structures that blur the boundaries between art and architecture.

The Grey Collection lacks examples of Armajani's large-scale installations, but it does include a selection of early calligraphic works that reveal his long-term interest in probing the links between word and image. In Calligraphy, 1964, for example, Persian inscriptions cover a white pictorial field. The diacritical marks that serve to differentiate Persian letters are omitted, rendering the text illegible. Its lively calligraphic characters fashioned in contrasting styles and oriented in several different directions, Calligraphy inhabits the gap between words' forms and their meanings.

Armajani's early aesthetic experiences—steeped in modern Iranian debates concerning the proper balance of old and new, picture and text, idea and place—helped shape his 1986 project for the World Financial Center Plaza in Battery Park City. Situated a little over a mile from the Grey Art Gallery, the installation consists of a metal railing overlooking the Hudson River and Statue of Liberty. In this work, which incorporates quotations from verses by Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara celebrating the spirit of New York City, Armajani offers a nuanced vision of public space, where architecture, sculpture, and poetry merge into a seamless whole.

A Brief History of 20th-Century IranBy Shiva Balaghi

Colonialism and Constitutionalism: Iran at the Turn of the Century

At the outset of the 20th century, Iran was embroiled in a bifurcated struggle. On the one hand, Iranians struggled to maintain their national independence in the face of growing colonial pressures. Iran's geopolitical importance made it a central focus of the colonial "Great Game" between Russia and Great Britain. Ultimately, in August 1907, the two great powers decided to carve Iran up into spheres of influence; the agreement sealed Russian supremacy in the north and British supremacy in the south of Iran.

At the same time, a struggle was taking place within Iran's borders, as the country was undergoing the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11). A dispute over sugar prices finally sparked the first public protests of that revolution. In 1905, the governor of Tehran ordered that some sugar merchants be bastinadoed for refusing to lower their prices. A group of merchants, tradesmen, and mullahs took sanctuary (bast) in a Tehran mosque. Government officials dispersed the group, who then took refuge in a shrine south of Tehran. By January 1906 the Muzaffar al-Din Shah Qajar agreed to their demands, which included the formation of an 'adalatkhanah (house of justice).

Despite his assurances, the Shah did not follow up on his promises, leading to growing discontent and unrest. Finally, there was a confrontation involving a group of clerics and their students in which a student was killed. This violent encounter led to another bast. This time, between 12,000 and 14,000 protestors gathered in the British legation, demanding the formation of a majlis, or parliament. The Shah finally relented, and in August 1906 he issued a decree calling for the formation of a national assembly in Iran. The first majlis convened in October 1906 and set about the task of writing a constitution. An ailing Muzaffar al-Din Shah decreed the document they produced into law in December 1906, a few days before his death. In October 1907 the new king signed the Supplementary Fundamental Law. Together, the two documents formed the core of the Iranian Constitution.

The course of the Constitutional Revolution would remain rocky for some years to come. Internal differences amongst the revolutionaries, reluctance by the Qajar shahs to relinquish power to the national assembly, and colonial interests in maintaining

control over key aspects of governance severely hampered Iran's first experience of democratization. By the Fall of 1911, matters came to a head, and Russia, with the support of England, gave the majlis an ultimatum that would essentially nullify Iran's independence. The majlis refused, and Russian troops entered northern Iran; they brutally killed some of the leading constitutionalists. Other intellectuals and activists fled Iran. Russian troops stormed the majlis. Under threat of foreign occupation of Iran, the second majlis was dissolved.1 Though the parliament and the constitution were retained as Iran emerged from its first revolution of the 20th century, the spirit of constitutionalism was dealt a serious blow.

The Rise of the Pahlavi Dynasty

World War I found Iran in difficult straits. Its economy was shattered, and the country suffered from a growing power vacuum. In 1921 Reza Khan led a group of soldiers into Tehran. He demanded that the cabinet be dissolved and that the failing Qajar shah appoint him commander of the military. Using the army as his primary instrument, Reza Khan sought to restore a sense of national unity within Iran's borders. In 1923, the last Qajar shah named Reza Khan as prime minister and then traveled to Europe to seek medical attention, never to return. The Qajar dynasty, which had ruled Iran since 1785, was deposed in 1925. Shortly thereafter, Reza Khan assumed the position of Shah and established the Pahlavi Dynasty.

Throughout the 19th century, the British and the Russians had vied for concessions to build railroads across Iran, but by the time Reza Shah came to power, no national rail system existed. The cornerstone of Reza Shah's economic reforms was the Trans-Iranian Railroad, linking the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea. The project was financed largely through taxes on sugar and tea; construction was completed in 1938. Reza Shah also initiated reforms in the areas of education and law, which were historically the domain of the clergy. Compulsory education for all Iranians was decreed, and hundreds of schools were built. In 1934, the University of Tehran was established. As he undertook various development projects, Reza Shah also consolidated his own power; the people of Iran "had been denied all share in political and social activities."2

By 1941, with the outbreak of World War II, the Persian Gulf and Iran's vast oil resources became critical for the success of the British Navy. Iran declared itself neutral, but Reza Shah, who had established strong cultural and technological ties with Germany, was perceived as problematic by the Allies. With Iran under virtual occupation by Allied forces, he was forced to abdicate his throne, and his young son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was crowned as the new king. Reza Shah would die in exile in 1944.

The Reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was twenty-two years old when he assumed his position as the Shah of Iran. Allied forces occupied much of the country. After the end of World War II, Russia continued to occupy regions of northern Iran. The young Shah visited the United States, meeting with US officials and addressing the United Nations. Under

pressure, the USSR withdrew from Iranian territory. The 1940s saw a resurgence in parliamentarism in Iran. In 1949, Mohammad Mossadeq formed the National Front Party, with the aim of upholding the 1906 Constitution. One of the main goals of the National Front was to nationalize Iran's oil industry; the British continued to control most of Iran's oil revenue through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In 1951, the Shah appointed Mossadeq as prime minister. Mossadeq followed through on his plans to nationalize the oil industry, and the National Iranian Oil Company was formed. For many Iranians, Mossadeq became a nationalist leader. To some Western leaders with economic interests in the Middle East, his actions set an unwelcome precedent. In 1952 Mossadeq was named Time magazine's Man of the Year. In 1953 the British MI-6 and the CIA undertook Operation Ajax, which toppled Mossadeq from power. To many Iranians, Mossadeq became a symbol of yet another moment in history when foreign  intervention played a pivotal role in thwarting a democratic movement in Iran. Meanwhile, as Iran emerged from the political unrest of the 1950s, its economy was in tatters.

In 1963, the Shah announced his White Revolution, a program that included land reform, the nationalization of forests, the sale of state-owned enterprises to the private sector, a profit-sharing plan for industrial workers, and the formation of a Literacy Corps to eradicate illiteracy in rural areas. The White Revolution also granted Iranian women the right to vote, increased women's minimum legal marriage age to 18, and improved women's legal rights in divorce and child custody matters. These reforms were opposed by some of Iran's clergy, in particular Ayatollah Khomeini. Khomeini led the June 5, 1963 uprising, opposing the Shah and the White Revolution. In the course of this uprising, the authorities quelled resistance among the religious students in a seminary in the city of Qum, and a number of students lost their lives.  Khomeini's activities eventually led to his exile to Iraq in 1964.

The oil boom of the 1970s ushered in an influx of petro-dollars, with which the regime spearheaded major development programs. The accelerated rate of development exacerbated unequal distribution of wealth and led to a variety of social problems in Iran.3 Discontent with government policies was spreading through various segments of Iranian society. In 1976, leading members of the National Front published an open letter to the Shah, calling on his government to comply fully with the 1906 Constitution. In the Fall of 1977 the Iranian Writers' Association organized a series of poetry readings at the Goethe Institute in Tehran known as "Dah Shab" or Ten Nights. Towards the end of the ten nights, the writers and some students took to the streets, demanding an end to censorship. By the winter of 1978, major demonstrations became increasingly common in Iran's major cities. 4 On January 16, 1979, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi left Iran. On February 1, 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned.

Alternative Histories of Modern Iran

In the summer of 1883, the first American minister to the Persian court, S.G.W. Benjamin, traveled to Tehran and reported his impressions to the US Secretary of State:

No city in the east after Canton, Bombay, Calcutta, and Constantinople surpasses it in appearance of vitality.  The number of carriages owned by Persian and European gentlemen is nearly 500, all imported. Teheran also contains a European bakery, a European carriage maker, a European cabinet maker and upholsterer, a corps of foreign instructors of the army, a steam engine at the arsenal, a mint formed on [a] European system, several town clocks, a hose in the public garden imported from the United States, gas in the grounds surrounding the palace, and public squares besides other evidences of a progressive tendency.5

In 1975, American feminist Betty Friedan chronicled her first impressions of the city:

My first few days in Tehran were strictly caviar and jet lag and a sense of being strangely at home. Tehran, a Middle Eastern city, seems like an American Western boom town—buildings going up overnight, international banks next to a Persian Wimpy stand, and no beggars.6

Near the end of the 19th century, Benjamin suggested that the prevalence of European objects throughout Tehran held a certain promise of progressive change. Nearly a century later, Friedan described the results of this promise—Tehran had become "an American Western boom town." Both Benjamin and Friedan focused on the material manifestations of progress and equated that progress with things European or American. Neither looked for the underpinnings of modernity in the Iranian cultural sphere, where modernity was actively constructed, debated, and contested. The truncated narrative of 20th-century Iranian history presented in this essay highlights major events and political actors. It does not provide a nuanced, textured explanation of how these events were experienced, how political currents were shaped by individuals. The visual arts can offer alternative narratives of Iranian history.  The work on display in Between Word and Image provides important insights into Iranian modernity in the critical decades of the 1960s and '70s.

Notes

1 For a more complete history of the Persian Revolution see E. G. Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905–1909 (London: Frank Cass, 1966), reprinted edition; Mangol Bayat, Iran's First Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Nikki Keddie and Mehrdad Amanat, "Iran Under the Late Qajars, 1848–1922," Cambridge History of Iran, v. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 174–212; and Nikki Keddie, Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan, 1796–1925 (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Press, 1999).

2 Ann Lambton, as quoted in "The Pahlavi Autocracy: Riza Shah, 1921–41," Cambridge History of Iran, v. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 243.

3 For discussions of the social implications of accelerated development, see Farhad Kazemi, Poverty and Revolution in Iran: The Migrant Poor, Urban Marginality and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1980) and Misagh Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University  Press, 1989).

4 For a detailed chronology of the Revolution, see Nicholas M. Nikazemerad, "A Chronological Survey of the Iranian Revolution," Iranian Studies (1980): 327–68.

5 Benjamin to Frelinghuysen, Tehran, October 2, 1883, Diplomatic Series no. 28, Despatches from United States Ministers to Persia, United States National Archives.

6 Betty Friedan, "Coming Out of the Veil," Ladies Home Journal (June 1975), p. 98.

Iranian Painting and Sculpture of the 1960s and '70s

Many of the artists featured in Between Word and Image were first introduced to American audiences by Abby Weed Grey, the founder of the Grey Art Gallery at New York University. Mrs. Grey, a Minnesota resident, was a passionate supporter of contemporary Middle Eastern and Asian art. As part of a trip around the world in 1960, she visited Iran. Over the next thirteen years, Mrs. Grey became the single most important foreign collector of Iranian modern art and her collection, which she donated to NYU in 1975, features works by many of the leading artists.

The 1960s and '70s were a time of a great artistic ferment in Iran, as elsewhere in the world. Many artists were actively exploring abstract modes of expression. Interestingly, centuries before modern artists in Europe and America turned to non-objective art, artistic traditions outside the West had eschewed realism. Beginning with Impressionism in the 1860s, avant-garde artists in Europe and America increasingly abandoned customary Western methods of representing visible reality, such as one-point perspective and the use of light and shade to create the illusion of volume. Many European and American artists turned eastward, looking to Japanese prints and Persian miniatures, as well as African sculpture, for inspiration. 

In the 1960s, Iranian artists were engaged in forging an aesthetic that was at once Iranian and modern. Drawing on materials and symbols in Persian culture, they infused them with new meanings. As Shiva Balaghi notes, modernity in the Iranian context was a complex field of negotiation and accommodation. Iranian modern artists were also working in an expanding institutional context. The Fine Arts Academy, which focused on architecture and painting, was established at the University of Tehran in 1940. The following year, as Allied forces occupied Iran, Reza Shah Pahlavi abdicated the throne to his young son. The period between 1941 and the 1953 coup that ousted Mohammad Mossadeq, the elected Prime Minister who nationalized the oil industry, was an era of unprecedented democracy. It was also a critical period in the development of Iranian modernism. Journals promoting modernist art and literature were published, and galleries dedicated to modern Iranian art were opened. As Fereshteh Daftari explains, during this period, some Iranian artists traveled to "Paris, Munich, or Istanbul, where they encountered a range of debates specific to the postwar era, then returned home with fragments of foreign vocabularies with which they attempted to describe local themes."

In 1954, Marcos Grigorian returned to Iran from Rome, where he had studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti.  Grigorian, who is included in the Grey Collection, was a key figure in the modern Iranian art scene. He opened the Galerie Esthétique, an important commercial gallery in Tehran. In 1958, under the auspices of the Ministry of Culture, he organized the first Tehran Biennial. Grigorian was also an influential teacher at the Fine Arts Academy, where he disseminated his

enthusiasm for local popular culture, including coffee-house paintings, a type of folk art named after the locations in which they were often displayed.

Hossein Zenderoudi, a student of Grigorian, likewise found great inspiration in coffee-house paintings. His imagination was fueled as well by other forms of Iranian popular culture—such as talismans that he encountered in the bazaars, and textiles he saw in the Iran Bastan Museum. As Daftari notes, he "established a fully developed syntax brewing a private mythology out of religion, superstition, augury, numerology, divination, and coded signs." Seeing some of Zenderoudi's paintings at the 1962 Tehran Biennial, Iranian art critic Karim Emami used the word saqqakhaneh, which denotes a ceremonial public fountain most often found in bazaars, to describe Zenderoudi's integration of populist themes from Iranian Shiite folk art with modern art forms. A former director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Kamran Diba, evocatively referred to this trend as Spiritual Pop Art: "There is a parallel between Saqqak-khaneh and Pop Art, if we simplify Pop Art as an art movement which looks at the symbols and tools of a mass consumer society as a relevant and influencing cultural force. Saqqak-khaneh artists looked at the inner beliefs and popular symbols that were part of the religion and culture of Iran, and perhaps, consumed in the same way as industrial products in the West." Zenderoudi's The Hand features calligraphy prominently and also references Shiite folklore.

Parviz Tanavoli is another of the most prominent saqqakhaneh artists and, like Zenderoudi, draws inspiration from both calligraphy and classical Persian poetry. In 1972 he made Heech, a bronze sculpture in the arching shapes of the Persian letters that spell out the word "nothing." With Heech, Tanavoli restated the importance of the written word as a form that is open to multiple interpretations. The following year, he produced Heech Tablet; its surface markings parody cuneiform inscriptions and recall the grillwork protecting Islamic religious structures. As Daftari explains, "Here ancient pre-Islamic inscriptions and the aura of Islamic religion are locked together in the expression of a continuous, undivided past." Through the years, Tanavoli developed a friendship with Abby Grey, who avidly collected his sculptures and lithographs. In addition to helping him establish a bronze foundry at the University of Tehran, she invited him to visit the United States, where he taught sculpture at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for a few years. Mrs. Grey also initiated a meeting between Tanavoli and another Iranian artist living in Minnesota, Siah Armajani. 

Armajani had moved to Minnesota to attend Macalester College, where his uncle was a professor.  He settled there permanently and became an American citizen. Best known today for his architectural constructions and public sculptures, Armajani draws inspiration from writings, including those of Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and reworks commonplace elements—such as walls, benches, windows, and doors—into complex structures that blur the boundaries between art and architecture.

The Grey Collection lacks examples of Armajani's large-scale installations, but it does include a selection of early calligraphic works that reveal his long-term interest in probing the links between word and image. In Calligraphy, 1964, for example, Persian inscriptions cover a white pictorial field. The diacritical marks that serve to differentiate Persian letters are omitted, rendering the text illegible. Its lively calligraphic characters fashioned in contrasting styles and

oriented in several different directions, Calligraphy inhabits the gap between words' forms and their meanings.

Armajani's early aesthetic experiences—steeped in modern Iranian debates concerning the proper balance of old and new, picture and text, idea and place—helped shape his 1986 project for the World Financial Center Plaza in Battery Park City. Situated a little over a mile from the Grey Art Gallery, the installation consists of a metal railing overlooking the Hudson River and Statue of Liberty. In this work, which incorporates quotations from verses by Walt Whitman and Frank O'Hara celebrating the spirit of New York City, Armajani offers a nuanced vision of public space, where architecture, sculpture, and poetry merge into a seamless whole.

Press released

GREY ART GALLERY FEATURES IRANIAN ART, POSTERS, AND PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE 1960s AND 1970s

"Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture"on view at NYU September 18–December 7, 2002

New York City, July 1, 2002…A groundbreaking exhibition, Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture examines three discrete but interrelated aspects of Iranian art of the 1960s and 1970s.  Co-organized by New York University's Grey Art Gallery and Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Between Word and Image presents over 100 rarely exhibited works—fine art, revolutionary posters, and black-and-white photographs—and is on view at NYU from September 18 to December 7, 2002. Introducing American audiences to modern Iranian art, Between Word and Image also sheds light on the many ways that visual culture both reflected and affected the 1960s and 1970s, two decades which saw dramatic changes, such as the politicization of Islam and the 1979 Revolution.

 The first section of Between Word and Image features approximately 30 paintings, sculptures, and works on paper from the Grey Art Gallery's unparalleled collection of modern Iranian art. Adopting an increasingly social role, Iranian modern artists grappled with questions of how to reconcile their contemporary sensibilities with their Iranian heritage. Inspired by classical Persian poetry, calligraphy, and miniature paintings, they also appropriated images of Shiism, the dominant form of Islam in Iran. Also exhibited are 34 striking black-and-white photographs from the 1970s by Abbas, an Iranian photojournalist living in Paris and a member of Magnum Photos, the world-renowned collective. The exhibition concludes with a selection of revolutionary posters by both professional and amateur artists who merged calligraphy, graphics, and rhetoric in order to convey abstract ideologies. These three elements—art, photographs, and posters—furnish an important opportunity to rethink the notion of modernism in a non-Western culture.

Shiva Balaghi, Associate Director of the Kevorkian Center, observes, "The construction of modernity in Iran was an act of resistance and creation. It entailed seeking out new ways in which the arts could engage social and political concerns. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iranian visual artists began to appropriate the traditional role of the poet as Iranian society's conscious and all-seeing critic. In this sense, Iran's visual culture of this period is an archival record of the social and political problems that were emerging; it serves as the artistic pre-history to the Iranian Revolution of 1979."

"The arts serve as a testament to creativity as well as a historical record of upheaval and crisis," notes Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery. "Between Word and Image allows us to learn more about modern Persian art and to begin to understand how a country that was heralded as a paragon of universal modernization underwent an Islamic Revolution whose message was steeped in localized imagery demanding an idealized return to the past."

The modern Iranian works housed at the Grey Art Gallery—part of the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Asian and Middle Eastern Art—comprise the largest public holding of Iranian modern art outside of Iran. Amassed by Abby Grey on numerous trips to the Middle East and Asia in the 1960s and 1970s to promote artistic exchange, the collection includes major early works by the most prominent Iranian artists such as Siah Armajani, Parviz Tanavoli, and Hossein Zenderoudi. One work, Sealed Letter, a 1964 drawing by the noted large-scale public sculptor Siah Armajani, who now lives in Minneapolis, links calligraphy with the highly revered tradition of Persian poetry as a form of social critique. As in Heech, 1972, by sculptor Parviz Tanavoli, the abstract forms simultaneously constitute both word and image. In addition to featuring the Grey's holdings of Iranian art, the show includes several key works lent by New York's Museum of Modern Art.

The second section of the exhibition features photographs by Abbas that provide critical information about Iran in 1970s, when he returned to his native country to produce a photo-essay examining the social and economic changes brought on by the country's rapidly expanding oil industry. One visit coincided with the outbreak of the Revolution. Between 1978 and 1980, Abbas took hundreds of photographs, providing startling and vivid views of Tehran and its citizens caught up in the throes of a whirlwind. Some have become iconic images. An avid diarist, Abbas views his writing as an integral part of the process of making pictures. The show at the Grey juxtaposes excerpts from Abbas's diaries with his photographs, recalling the Persian tradition of illuminated manuscripts. As Balaghi notes, "As in that tradition, Abbas's words and his pictures can stand alone, but they develop a more textured meaning when taken together as a single art form."

Finally, the Iranian revolutionary posters shown in Between Word and Image offer another fascinating glimpse into modern Iranian visual culture. Composed of bold forms and intense colors, such as red (identified with Marxist liberation movements) or green, black, and red (significant in Islam), and usually incorporating calligraphy, these posters were ubiquitous throughout Tehran during the uprising. Made between 1978 and 1980, they were used as props in mass, choreographed street demonstrations and also covered the many walls of Iran's cities, often defacing public monuments built by the Pahlavi regime as symbols of its authority and grandeur. As government agents tore them off or covered them with paint, protesters would replace them

with replenished supplies. Many of the posters allude to battle scenes from the Koran or classical Persian poetry. In one image, the raised arms of defiant militants merge with calligraphy proclaiming a defiant slogan, "There is only one God," against a vivid red background that both signals bloodshed and alludes to the red tulip, an icon of classical Persian literature. In another, an anonymous artist juxtaposes a black-and-white silkscreened portrait of the Ayatollah Khomeini against an abstract, brightly colored background, clearly referencing the work of American Pop artist Andy Warhol, whose portraits of the Shah and the Queen hung in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Still others collaged newspaper images by photojournalists such as Abbas. Here art, reportage, poetry, and politics became enmeshed in a distinct form of visual culture.

As Fereshteh Daftari, a co-curator of the exhibition, observes, "Iranian modernism, like many of the culturally specific modernisms that emerged around the globe, was not synonymous with the one constructed in the West. Both nationalist and internationalist, it looked inward as well as outward. In art its languages included realism and abstraction, but formal issues were not its primary problems: the fundamental questions addressed by Iranian modernism had to do with the notion of identity." Between Word and Image was co-curated by Lynn Gumpert and Fereshteh Daftari in consultation with Shiva Balaghi, Peter Chelkowski, and Haggai Ram.

Sponsorship

Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Visual Culture has been made possible, in part, by grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Reed Foundation, the Soudavar Memorial Foundation, the Iran Heritage Foundation, and the Flora Family Foundation. The project also received funding from New York University's Offices of the Provost, Academic and Health Affairs, and Student Affairs; the Hagop Kevorkian Center's grant from the Ford Foundation's Crossing Borders program; and the Grey Art Gallery's Abby Weed Grey Trust.

Abby Weed Grey and Parviz TanavoliBy Shiva Balaghi

“People moving along Tehran’s Pahlavi Avenue (now renamed Vali-‘Asr Avenue) in 1960,” recalled Parviz Tanavoli, “would have seen a gigantic sculpture on the balcony of one of the apartments that overlooked the street. Constructed from scrap metal, this assemblage depicted a man embracing a deer. The deer’s antlers were made of a bicycle’s form, the man and animal bodies of fenders and other parts of junkyard vehicles. A little below this sculpture, above the

entrance, hung a small sign that bore the name ‘Atelier Kaboud’ in both Persian and Latin Letters. This was my first studio.”

The neighborhood surrounding the studio fed Tanavoli’s artistic imagination. He scoured South Tehran’s pottery workshops, blacksmith and welder’s shops, foundries, and street vendors, integrating images, forms, themes, and found objects into his sculptures, ceramics, and paintings. “In our culture,” Tanavoli explained to me, “art is in every aspect of life.” When not making art, he collected talismans, locks, posters with religious inscriptions, and carpets. He also studied the architecture of Shiite devotional spaces—the saqqakhaneh and emamzadeh—fountains and shrines. It was then that Tanavoli began to help formulate the Saqqakhaneh school. Named for the public structures where water is available to passers-by, this school looked inward to local cultural practices. Kamran Diba, former director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, saw an affinity between Saqqakhaneh art and Pop art: “…if we simplify Pop Art as an art movement which looks at the symbols and tools of a mass consumer society as a relevant and influencing cultural force. Saqqak-khaneh artists looked at the inner beliefs and popular symbols that were part of the religion and culture of Iran, and perhaps, consumed in the same ways as industrial products in the West.”(1)

At the Atelier Kaboud, a gathering place for poets, painters, architects and filmmakers, Tanavoli organized small exhibitions of his new works and those by other young artists such as Hossein Zenderoudi. These gatherings provided the genesis for an artists’ group known as Contemporary Artists—Marcos Grigorian, Sirak Melkanian, Bijan Saffari, Sohrab Sepehri, Manuchehr Shaybani, and Tanavoli. In June 1961, the collective organized an exhibition of their work in Bank Saderat. “Viewers came in droves,” Tanavoli remembers.(2)

Amongst the crowd was Abby Weed Grey, who was in Tehran for an exhibition of Minnesotan artists she had organized at the Iran-America Society. She remarked on the exhibition at Bank Saderat in her diary: “The architectural setting with its polished marble floor and marble walls, its vaulted ceilings and elegant lighting, was the perfect background for the work: bold abstract paintings, collages in wild and exciting colors, modernist metal sculptures and ceramics.” It was here that she was first introduced to Parviz Tanavoli. The next day, Grey made her way to Atelier Kaboud, a space she felt “glowed with the brilliant colors and vitality of his work.” That day, she purchased her first piece by Tanavoli. “I kept returning to a large painting in ink gouache, and gilt whose subject was intriguing,” she wrote in her diary. “The work, which was called Myth, depicted three figures, one, the apprentice, holding a mallet, the other a legendary sculptor, Farhad. Protecting both was a gold and blue angel, wings open. For me it went right back to Arabian Nights. But of course it was a Persian tale. I felt I had to have it and purchased it on the spot.”(3)

Parviz Tanavoli, Myth, 1961gouache, ink and gilt on paper, 39 x 27 1/4 inches (99.1 x 69.2 cm)Grey Art GalleryNew York University Art Collection

Gift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.70

Abby Grey would become an avid collector and devoted mentor to Tanavoli, who, in turn, helped Grey become familiar with some of the most notable contemporary artists in Iran in the 1960s and ’70s.  Her collection, which forms the basis of the Grey Art Gallery’s collection of modern Iranian art, bears the mark of their close relationship. Indeed, it contains one of the most significant extant collections of Tanavoli’s oeuvre—nearly 80 works ranging from paintings, drawings, and prints, to jewelry, ceramics, and sculptures.

Returning to Minnesota after her initial meeting with Tanavoli, Grey helped arrange a residency for him at the Minneapolis School of Art. In February 1962, Tanavoli arrived in Minneapolis. “To alleviate my loneliness and ease my transition during a severe, snowy winter,” Tanavoli explained, “Mrs. Grey had arranged for a room for me in [Siah] Armajani’s house.” A close friendship developed between the two artists—with Tanavoli helping  Armajani keep apace of artistic developments in Iran. The artist Marcos Grigorian, who had been living in New York, also moved to Minneapolis around this time. He opened the Universal Galleries. Grey’s home and Grigorian’s gallery became centers for Iranian art in Minneapolis. In 1963, the Universal Galleries mounted an exhibition that included works by Armajani, Grigorian, Tanavoli, and Zenderoudi.

The bond between Grey and Tanavoli grew. “When I went to Minneapolis,” Tanavoli told me, “I saw Abby nearly every day. She had just begun collecting art and was very eager to learn about Iranian art and culture. During those regular teas, I filled her in as much as I could. She liked me like her son.” After two and a half years of teaching and making art in Minneapolis, Tanavoli returned to Tehran. “After I returned to Iran, she came to see me every year. I took her to artists’ studios and art galleries. She not only bought art, she loved to converse with artists.” In 1964, Grey helped Tanavoli establish a bronze foundry at the University of Tehran. Tanavoli taught at the University of Tehran, set up a workshop, and helped organize a seminar on contemporary Iranian art at the Iran-America society.

During these years, Tanavoli’s art  reflected a synthesis: “I made use of traditional material such as copper vessels, rugs and calligraphy, along with such Western imports as plastics, fluorescent lights and basic electric equipment,” he explains. The works, which were exhibited at the Borghese Gallery in 1965, caused “considerable hostile clamor” as Grey recalled. The show was closed within a few days, and Tanavoli writes, “Over the years most of those paintings and sculptures have been destroyed, and all that is left to me is a series of vague recollections.” The piece that Grey purchased from the exhibition remains in the Grey Art Gallery’s collection: “I had chosen Hands of a Poet, a box construction in which from the inside two plaster hands clasped a crisscrossed lattice grille. This is such deeply involved symbolism that it must not be read as representing repression (hands extending through the bars of a prison cell). Rather it represents the hands of a suppliant at a prayer grille.”

Parviz Tanavoli, Hands of a Poet, 1966painted wood and plaster construction47 3/4 x 32 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (121.3 x 82.6 x 8.9 cm)Grey Art Gallery New York University Art CollectionGift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.47

Tanavoli is a collector, scholar, and artist. These roles, he explained to me, “are so interwoven, I can hardly separate them from each other.” His intimate knowledge of locks, kohl containers, and rugs has resulted in a series of publications and exhibitions based on his collections. In 1974, the Ben and Abby Grey Foundation helped sponsor a traveling exhibition of Tanavoli’s Lion Rugs from Fars.(4) Tanavoli also created rugs himself, and the Grey’s collection includes a print, Oh! Nightingale (1974), that is a design for a carpet. The composition centers on Farhad—the poetic sculptor who is Tanavoli’s mythic muse—here rendered in a robotic style.  His face resembles grillwork from which two locks are hanging. In his hand, Farhad holds a nightingale, the bird whose song Persian poets often wrote of. Reworking tropes from classical Persian literature, tribal rug weaving, calligraphy, and Islamic rituals, Tanavoli produced a work that weds Pop art to traditional Iranian motifs.

Parviz Tanavoli, Oh! Nightingale (design for rug), 1974silkscreen on paper, sheet: 27 3/4 x 20 1/8 inches Grey Art Gallery, New York University Art CollectionGift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.616

Ironically, Grey acquired her most substantial work by Tanavoli, Heech Tablet (1973), during her last trip to Iran in 1973 on the occasion of a special exhibition of his sculptures on the heech theme. Heech is the Persian word for “nothing,” and through the years, Tanavoli has made numerous variations ranging from intricate jewelry, to bronze statues, to large sculptures made of fiberglass. “The sculpture appeared monumental,” Grey wrote of Heech Tablet. The work draws on Tanavoli’s interest in ancient Persian civilization and in the quotidian culture of folk Islam. Standing nearly seven feet high on its travertine stone base, the bronze is covered with stylus markings mimicking cuneiform script that form an outline of the word heech.  The markings also recall the lattice grillwork of shrines from which devotees have hung locks. “Mine was the nothingness of hope and friendship, a nothingness that did not seek to negate. In my mind, it was not life that amounted to nothing, but rather nothing which brimmed with life itself.”

Parviz Tanavoli, Heech Tablet, 1973bronze on travertine stone base71 1/2 x 18 1/2 x 11 7/8 inches (181.6 x 47.0 x 30.2 cm) (including integral base)Grey Art Gallery New York University Art CollectionGift of Abby Weed Grey, G1975.570

NOTES

1 Kameran Diba, “Iran,” in Contemoprary Art from the Islamic World, ed. Widjan Ali (London: Scorpion Press, 1989), p. 153.

2 Tanavoli has written eloquently about his early career as an artist in his essay, “Atelier Kaboud,” in Parviz Tanavoli: Sculptor, Writer, and Collector, ed. David Galloway (Tehran: Iranian Art Publishing, 2000), pp. 53-113. Quotes by Tanavoli in this essay are from this article and from correspondence with the author.

3 Citations from Abby Grey’s diary are taken from her memoir. Abby Weed Grey, The Picture is the Window, the Window is the Picture (NY: New York University Press, 1983).

4 Between 1974 and 1975, the exhibition traveled as part of the Smithsonian Institution’s Traveling Exhibition Service to the Paine Art Center in Wisconsin, the Textile Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Grey Art Gallery at NYU.