2022Fereshteh Daftari

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 Assar, Hossein Zenderoudi, and Abolhassan Saidi), he wrote, had chosen Paris. 

Yektai belonged to the generation of artists born in the 1920s. After emigrating—with the exception of a few years in Paris (from 1946 to 1947 and again from 1959 to 1962), the summer of 1958 in Positano with his partner Ilse Getz, and sporadic visits to Iran (including a yearlong visit in 1969)—he lived and worked in New York City and its vicinity until he passed away in Sagaponack, New York, in 2019. He did not settle in New York, however, until he had exorcised his yearning for Paris. There he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and took classes at the atelier of the Cubist painter André Lhote. He even encouraged Jalil Ziapour—a college mate from Tehran and the future champion of Cubism in Iran—to attend Lhote’s atelier.

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

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

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

“Early in this century Henri Matisse was inspired by Persian forebears of Yektai, who painted miniatures with the subtlest skills and inordinate refinements of technique. How curious that this modern Persian should respond to Matisse though not to the Iranian elements in his design.” 

Adlow’s perspective still resonates today in critical expectations of Middle Eastern artists having fixed and prescribed identities and in their continuing the aesthetic legacy of their cultural heritage as expressed in calligraphy, in miniature painting, or, more recently, in addressing the relation of women to the symbolism of the veil. Why did Adlow not consider rupture as audacity, as a deliberate break with the past and a choice to communicate in a transnational language? Is transcending the local a betrayal of one’s heritage, a repudiation of one’s ethnicity, a transgression into a territory reserved for those who are, in Barack Obama’s terms, “born into imperial cultures”? Iranian historiography having been inaccessible to Western critics, they were, and often are, unaware that ties with local traditions had been severed way back in the late nineteenth century, when academic painting, imported from the West, infiltrated the pedagogy of art schools in Iran and paradoxically became a cipher for modernity. Yektai’s choice of themes (still life, landscape, portrait) may reflect his hybrid cultural origin; it may also be a manifestation of what came to be termed in Iran as “Westoxication,” or the unhealthy lure of things Western—in other words, an alienation from one’s own culture. Regarding this discourse, it is instructive to learn that Yektai saw his first miniature painting in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and not in Iran. 

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

Yektai, on the other hand, shunned inherited, expected, mandated, and constructed boundaries and expedient identities. He underscored that he was Iranian in his poetry, which is dependent on the Persian language, but was “stateless” (my word) in his visual art. Yet in sifting through myriad reviews of his work by the most prominent critics of the time (who considered him a member of the New York Abstract Expressionists), it becomes evident that some detected an Iranian accent. “One might anticipate an ethnic novelty and it is brilliantly here, in the idiomatic arabesques of grand strokes, taut and arbitrary, and in Yektai’s taste,” wrote one critic. “Calligraphy becomes descriptive,” wrote another. Thomas B. Hess insinuated a cultural link when declaring that Yektai employs “most of the conventional Western subjects—the landscape, still-life, the nude, portraits—but treats them in odd, perhaps Middle Eastern ways.” In fact, such inflections not only are absent in Yektai’s oeuvre but were equally missing in the works of his contemporaries working inside Iran. Only their subject matter (in Public Bath of 1949, by the Cubist painter Ziapour, for instance) was of local derivation. It was not until a younger generation arrived on the Tehran scene in the early 1960s that the valorization of the local was embraced in the short-lived, culturally specific modernist movement that came to be known as the Saqqakhaneh (ca. 1961–65). Its exponents, to counter ill-digested Western influences, rummaged through the local popular culture and unearthed an iconography, never before depicted in the “fine arts,” that resonated with what critics called the “national conscience.” Subsequently, around 1965, another type of modernist movement, building on the calligraphic tradition and today 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 off from both movements) was by the early 1960s creating his own allover textual abstractions. 

Yektai was never swayed by “Middle Eastern ways” in his paintings, and they give no evidence of his Iranian roots. New York provided him with a permissive space, a fertile ground in which to grow and become the artist we know today. Unconcerned with a national language but passionate about a tradition that includes the plunging views of Cézanne and Pollock’s action painting (Yektai also placed his canvases on the ground), he did acknowledge his admiration for Kamal al-Din Behzad (1450–1535), possibly his aerial perspectives. Does this mere oral acknowledgment permit us to postulate an influence and conflate it with the range of other influences? Is it plausible to link Yektai to cultural traditions of his homeland, going back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? It seems more relevant to frame him as a modernist, if modernism may be articulated not simplistically as a triumphalist American phenomenon of pure abstraction, but rather as a generous aesthetic harboring a diversity of visions derived from any tradition an artist is inspired by: Pollock by Mexican art and Native American sand painting, or Yektai following in the footsteps of Cézanne. Yektai tilts up the picture plane, but he goes further than Cézanne in allowing a still life to morph into a landscape and a landscape to glide into abstraction. A landscape crushed under heavy impasto or flattened into abstract gestures has an affinity with the New York vision, one that was alien to the traditional Iranian manuscript painters (who were attentive to a clear articulation of “edges and things,” even from an aerial perspective) and the “modern” academicism, or Old Master Modernism, that dominated the art of the first half of the twentieth century in Iran. Yektai inserted himself into a tradition that began with Cézanne and evolved via Pollock and de Kooning, but not necessarily in a Greenbergian sense. His attachment to representation—perhaps the only feature his work shares with Cubism, despite his studies with Lhote and Amédée Ozenfant—is essential to the dialectic he tackled from every direction throughout his career. Resenting all labels, Abstract Expressionist included, he claimed, “I try to be a contemporary painter.” These words should clearly answer both chauvinist and Orientalizing critics who demand or detect ethnic qualities. They should block ghettoizing impulses. 

Yektai’s preoccupation is best described in formalist and not nationalist terms, as a rejection of the abstraction–figuration binary. To Franz Kline, he retorted, “Ingres is abstraction.” Among his contemporaries, there were others who were also tethered to the two “oppositional” modes, a synthesis found in the works of artists represented by the Grace Borgenicht Gallery (Avery, Jimmy Ernst, Wolf Kahn) and even outside that roster. In the catalogue of an exhibition organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956, Grace Hartigan is quoted as stating, “I want an art that is not ‘abstract’ and not ‘realistic.’” Of the major Abstract Expressionists to whom Yektai gravitated, his work was closest to that of de Kooning, who did not banish the figure, however violently disfigured it may appear. Yektai’s commitment to an abstraction pregnant with figuration bears the stamp of the Paris and New York schools, of early French modernism, and of the raging Abstract Expressionist environment in which he was deeply embedded. (That he was an Iranian, something mentioned time and again by the reviewing critics, but an Iranian accepted as a member of the club and not a derivative or scorned outsider, is further proof that New York modernism was more open and pluralistic and less parochial than the triumphalist narrative would have it.) 

To fulfill his vision, Yektai went through various stages and methods of painting. He deliberately limited his subjects in a self-imposed system that opened a myriad of formal possibilities, and he flirted promiscuously with both abstraction and figuration. He piled paint on the surface, but he also reversed course, leaving the canvas empty, allowing unambiguously decipherable subjects—a flowerpot, some fruit, a road to nowhere—to float in the void. His early works, with their regular vertical marks, are reminiscent of Hans Hofmann’s abstractions. Tactile and edible are two adjectives used frequently to describe his thick application of paint, which he squeezed onto the canvas straight out of the tube. Soutine has been mentioned, as has Van Gogh. Like Bonnard, Yektai painted from memory. Like him and Matisse, he juxtaposed interiors with outdoor window views. The brush was only one item in his toolbox: he used a palette knife, spatulas, a whip, and trowels of different shapes—bricklayers’ instruments—which he slid in one direction and then another, creating a rushed fluidity and the illusion of motion and, in the process, animating static images of conventional Beaux-Arts derivation, such as still lifes, landscapes, and portraits. Sometimes, obliterating the identity of his subject matter, he seemed to be painting his palette board. This device was best explained by Annette Michelson, who saw Yektai as “being involved in a brilliant attempt to reconcile the aesthetic of the ‘oeuvre’ with that of the ‘action,’ to make the paint speak for the figure, for itself, and for the ‘act’ or ‘gesture.’” Finally, his fingers may be added to the arsenal. Wearing a glove, he combed the surface of his paintings—notably his portrait paintings, in which the figure, the antithesis of abstraction, must be defaced, assassinated, if abstraction is to peek through. (Robert Pincus-Witten described this imperative as “Kill the sitter.”) An example of such a work, Yektai told me, is his Portrait of Romain Gary (1962), who he described as a “dark character.” It is no surprise that one of his portraits, Concierge (1960), was included in Recent Painting USA: The Figure, a circulating exhibition that opened in 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art, where, after ten or fifteen years of immersion in abstraction, the role of the figure was being reexamined. 

Yektai came from Tehran to New York, then he traveled to Paris and back to New York. Modernism, however, was his route and his final destination. Thomas McEvilley was wrong when he asserted that in “Iran … under Islamic strictures about imagery, free artistic expression was not available” but right when he defined Yektai’s pursuit as “a search for Modernism, and for a participation in Modernism, indeed, for a home in it.”

 

NOTES 

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

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

3. Ibid.

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

5. Yektai, communication with author, April 2014.

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

7. Yektai, communication with author, August 2013.

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

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

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

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

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

13. Yektai, communication with author, April 2014.

14. In 1957 Sidney Geist wrote, “Yektai is in the Abstract Expressionist School, not as an undergraduate, but as a member of the faculty.” See “Month in Review,” Arts 32, no. 3 (December 1957): 49.

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

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

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

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

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

20. Calligraphic modernism is sometimes erroneously conflated with the Saqqakhaneh stage, where letters were introduced into the composition but stayed secondary to the depicted imagery. It was not until the mid-1960s that, in the case of these artists, letters replaced all other imagery in their allover compositions. It is noteworthy that Siah Armajani’s allover compositions, created in Minneapolis, with nothing else but letters, precede the calligraphic modernism of the Saqqakhaneh artists. On calligraphic modernism, see Iftikhar Dadi, Rethinking Calligraphic Modernism (London and Cambridge, MA: Institute of International Visual Arts and MIT Press, 2006), 95.

21. Yektai, communication with author, April 2014.

22. A critic noted of Yektai that “his style … barely respects the shapes and edges of things.” See S[idney] T[illim], “In the Galleries: Yektai,” Arts Magazine 34 (February 1960): 56. On 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 author, 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,” Arts Magazine 35, nos. 8–9 (May–June 1961): 19.

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

28. Yektai, communication with author, August 2013.

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