Fereshteh daftari biography

Persia Reframed: Iranian Visions of Modern and Contemporary Art is a tour de force by the curator and scholar Fereshteh Daftari, whose prolific career began in the late 1980s. For her PhD dissertation, later published as a book, Daftari argued that Persian art served a ‘liberating role’ for iconic modernist figures such as Gauguin, Matisse and Kandinsky. She stated that these artists ‘derived their innovative styles from features which the Western canon was inhibiting but which they saw as being confirmed and embraced in the East’ (xii). In the following years, the significance of Persian and Islamic art within the Western canon continued to shape Daftari’s curatorial vision, which steadily placed Persian art at the centre of artistic discourse. This transpired first during her tenure at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1988–2009), and then through a series of major independent curatorial projects around the world. Daftari’s curatorial practice and research also extended into a rich corpus of writing on modern and contemporary Iranian art, including the book under review. Extensively researched and generously illustrated, Persia Reframed is divided into six chapters that advance chronologically, from the turn of the twentieth century to 2018.

Daftari’s study loosely frames concepts that capture aesthetic and ideological preferences, stylistic themes and genres. These include spirituality, morality, calligraphy, Saqqakhaneh (a mid-century artistic movement inspired by coffee-house paintings and religious paraphernalia), formalism, appropriation, gender, Westoxication (a term popularised by Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, which refers to the harmful consequences of Westernisation) and a host of other frameworks that signify artistic involvement with socio-political issues.

“Yektai: A Search for Modernism”

In the mid-1940s, few Iranian artists could act on their desire to leave Iran to study in Europe. Manoucher Yektai and Monir Shahroudy (later Farmanfarmaian, Yektai’s wife from 1948 to 1953) were among the first who did. Their goal was France, not the American Dream, but facing restrictions on passage to war-torn France, they set sail in 1944 on a ship that took them to California by way of Bombay and immediately after that to New York, where they arrived in 1945. 

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

In reference to Iranians who had left their native land, Karim Emami, the prominent critic for the English version of the Tehran-based newspaper Kayhan International, wrote, in 1965: 

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

Among the “ambulant” artists living in the United States in the 1960s, Emami named Yektai, Grigorian (who had studied in Italy in the 1950s), and the Assyrian Iranian Hannibal Alkhas (who divided his time between Tehran and the United States), while three other prominent artists (Nasser

Canonical studies of modern art continue to assume “Western” art as the “universal” modern. But modernism has always been a global enterprise, happening for different reasons at different times. In the mid-twentieth century, artists experimented with a range of artistic modes of art-making to reflect on shifts in economic, political, and social structures. As scholars today retrace the story of modernism – one that is more diverse and complex – how does this change the way we understand the history of art, and what it means to be modern?

Join Dr. Vishakha Desai, (Senior Advisor for Global Affairs at Columbia University), Dr. Fereshteh Daftari, (scholar and curator), and Sarah-Neel Smith (Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Maryland Institute College of Art) in conversation with Lynn Gumpert (Director of Grey Art Gallery at NYU in New York) on modernisms in India, Iran, and Turkey respectively.

Biographies

Fereshteh Daftari

Curator and scholar Fereshteh Daftari received her Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University. Her dissertation, The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse and Kandinsky, was published in 1991. During her tenure as curator in the department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1988 – 2009), she curated a number of international exhibitions including Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking (2006). Her curatorial work in the field of Iranian modernism includes Between Word and Image at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery (2002) and Iran Modern at the Asia Society in New York (2013). She has also focused on contemporary art. Action Now, the first exhibition of contemporary Iranian performance art, was held in Paris (2012); Safar/Voyage: Contemporary Works by Arab, Iranian, and Turkish Artists at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropolo