2022Media Farzin

When Manoucher Yektai entered the Fine Arts Academy at Tehran University in the early 1940s, he joined a cohort that would form Iran’s first visual avant-garde. It was a transitional moment for painting, and the professors fell into two distinct camps. On one side were the academic realists, who had been trained by the renowned painter Kamalol-Molk—the forefather of modern Iranian painting, known for his breathtakingly detailed portraits of kings and courtiers—and who urged meticulous charcoal copies of classical busts. Then there were the handful of Europeans and Iranians returned from abroad, who passed around books with black-and-white reproductions of works by the French Impressionists, and spoke thrillingly of color, light, and (gasp!) imagination.

The school itself was brand new, located on the grand, as yet unpaved, Shah Reza Avenue, across from what quickly became a cluster of cafés and bookstores. The painters, relegated to the basement of the engineering department, formed an eclectic community: Shokouh Riazi, the abstract painter just back from Paris, had joined as a teaching assistant; Sadegh Hedayat, then beginning to publish his surreal, resolutely modern short stories, worked as an administrator. Yektai’s classmates included Hossein Kazemi, who would rise to an important career as an abstract painter and educator, and Jalil Ziapour, who would establish the Fighting Rooster society and journal, one of the most visible bastions of the intellectual youthquake. Yektai himself would credit his earliest encounters with modern European painting to his teenage friendship with Mehdi Vishkai (they would enter the Academy together), who would go on to a prolific career as a society portraitist known for his expressive brushwork. And of course, two of Yektai’s friendships followed him abroad: Monir Shahroudy, one of the few members of this cohort, besides Yektai, to find international success (they were married between 1948 and 1953), and the multitalented Asad Behrouzan, known in Iran as a researcher, documentary photographer, and educator. 

The Fine Art Academy’s first students were an extraordinary—and extraordinarily ambitious—group, especially given the dearth of resources, knowledge, and opportunities in Iran in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Many, like Yektai, would continue their studies abroad: Ziapour to Paris (where, upon Yektai’s recommendation, he joined the atelier of Cubist painter André Lhote), painters Behjat Sadr and Mohsen Vaziri to Italy, where they would forge deeply original approaches to abstraction, and the poet-painter Sohrab Sepehri to Japan, which would leave a lasting mark on his austere landscapes. But few found the degree of critical and financial success, or the sense of community, that Yektai would find so quickly in New York. And so the others returned, for short stints or permanently: to work, teach, and exhibit; to found journals, schools, galleries, biennials, and museums—taking cautious advantage of the Pahlavi monarchy’s mercurial but growing embrace of art as a tool of soft power. Many even stayed through the Islamic Revolution of 1979; others still were persuaded to return for museum retrospectives in the 2000s. 

Yektai, however—despite several long visits to Iran, solo exhibitions there, and multiple volumes of published Persian poetry—would never really return. The next six decades would carry him far from that formative context and its discourse, even as he came to be known in Iranian circles, to quote the title of a major survey book of 1998, as one of the core “pioneers of contemporary Persian painting, first generation.” 

“Styles are meaningless,” Yektai told an interviewer in 2005. He was often dismissive of group affiliations and characterized his own approach in resolutely individual terms. “I’m searching for a firm truth, one that fulfills my own expectations,” he said in a 1976 interview; “what I want is for the things I create to have a truth within them that is hard to shake.” But the decades-long steadfastness of his search generated a distinctly personal style nonetheless, one defied by his choice of intimate, familiar subjects (still lifes, landscapes, portraits); paint laid in thick impasto, often with a trowel; and vivid hues, whose brilliance feels all the more masterful given the rapid smearing and layering of wet pigment that has created them. Yellows are so sunny they feel as if they must be warm to the touch, and whites take on an endless range of nuanced hues, some borrowed from the bare ground of the canvas itself. 

It wasn’t always so. There is a marked Surrealism to Yektai’s pre-1950 paintings, a reflection perhaps of the continued importance of the movement in postwar Paris during Yektai’s long-awaited first visit in 1946–47. A 1948 painting shows biomorphic forms in a variety of blues against a deeper ground of beiges and browns; a darker rectangle floats in the center, a flag of depth that emphasizes the flatness of everything else. The composition is lively but careful, spreading across the entire canvas but stopping short of the edges. The squiggly forms recall Miró’s dancing playfulness, Masson’s feel for texture, and Arp’s self-contained amoebas, but the short, repetitive brushstrokes look further back to Van Gogh. 

What happens to Yektai’s work between 1948 and 1950 is a classic epiphany of those years—an encounter with Jackson Pollock, in full color, in the pages of Life magazine in 1949. “I’d seen two of Pollock’s works in a magazine,” Yektai recalled in 2005. “As soon as I saw them, I knew it was an authentic approach, that it worked.” His praise is double-edged: “When I saw the work itself though, it didn’t add anything [to the experience]. … Because with Pollock, it can make no difference. The conception is what lands the work. It was the ultimate path.” Yektai recognized the spontaneity Pollock had absorbed from Surrealist automatism and chance, and immediately realized how generative such a freedom could be. But in his own work, he was always more interested in what paint could depict on a picture plane.

From Pollock’s gesture and speed, Yektai would build a body of work that never lost sight of the subject as both anchor and catapult of abstraction. 

I think, for example, of two paintings he created thirty years apart: Untitled (Yellow Tablecloth) of 1952, and an untitled still life from 1982. The 1952 work has all the impact of his most complex work. Thick daubs of gold and lemon yellow form a vibrant pattern on a surface that tilts up vertically to meet the eye, even as swirls of sky blue suggest a receding background, and grass green laid at the lower edge gives the table a cool, shadowy depth. The composition is held in place by neutral bars of color running down each side; like much of Yektai’s early work, the underlying structure is a sturdy grid of verticals and horizontals. But the work is all about the surface, as emphasized in the “tablecloth” of the title: it is the site of his observations and impressions, of speed and spontaneity, and a skillful experiment in what paint can convey in two (and three) dimensions. 

The 1982 painting feels quieter, ruled by swathes of creamy white, and the subject easier to read: a table, a window, pots of blooming flowers, a bowl of fruit. The canvas is smaller, and the composition more confidently asymmetrical. The table slopes gently down, the bowl tapers to an upward point, and a flowerpot, rising above the lightly demarcated edge of the table, connects with a wide streak that forms the edge of the window and takes the eye up to the top of the painting. Everything rests comfortably within the four edges of the canvas; while Yektai always commands his surfaces, he will always keep well within the frame, as if to emphasize primacy of representational space. The colors are muted—thick pastel pigments form the flowers, thinner brushwork fills out trees and fruit—but no less commanding than the saturated hues he uses elsewhere. The composition flows in easy arcs, but still speaks of Yektai’s attentiveness to horizontal and vertical, figure and ground, and the visual play that material accidents can stage between them. It’s a classic Yektai, in that it feels simultaneously ordinary and timeless, at once impulsive and deliberate. 

There were, naturally, a variety of approaches in between, especially in the first two decades: phases of thinned pigment (the interiors with snapdragons of the late fifties), works that pulled closer to abstraction (I think of Still Life D, 1959), and periods devoted to a single subject (the tomato plants, the lemons), not to mention the portraits he painted throughout, heralded by New York critics of the 1960s as a serious riposte to the pure abstraction of earlier decades. Most prominent among these voices was a young Hilton Kramer, not quite yet the conservative gatekeeper he would become, who lauded Yektai as “one of the few serious practitioners of figure painting on the current scene.” But the US critics were also fond of bringing up Belle Époque society painter Giovanni Boldini—not an entirely flattering reference, and hardly as apt or helpful a comparison as Vishkai’s work of the same period.

Yektai’s poetry, which he wrote throughout his life—always in Persian, in a free verse uniquely his own—lends more nuance, I think, to his creative and social sensibilities. Most moving is the epic Falgoosh, published in Iran in 1970 and never translated. The title, which means “eavesdropping,” refers to one of the many popular fortune-telling traditions of Iran, in which the fortune-seeker sets an intention, then takes the first words they hear (usually on the street, at night) as an omen. Yektai’s Falgoosh tells the story of a group of men who have gathered for a quixotic, collective falgoosh. Identified only by where they’re from (“A man from Salmas / one from Sistan / one from Birjand and Larestan”), they take to the streets of Tehran (“they made the fal and stood listening”) but hear nothing acceptable (“a woman doesn’t count / so they did not count her”). Night after night it continues, as winter turns into spring and then summer, as distinct characters emerge (the Yazdi is a troublemaker, the Shirazi a tyrant), and the answer to their unnamed problem perpetually eludes them. 

“Poetry was an everyday human need for him,” Yektai’s friend, poet Ahmad-Reza Ahmadi, has written. Falgoosh reveals a different Yektai, a thinker interested in the possibilities of everyday speech, absurdist humor, and political parable. Its unusual combination of idiomatic Persian and medieval poetic syntax yields a surprisingly accessible story, one that is equally familiar and surreal. It is also unusual within his larger body of poetry, given its highly narrative, almost theatrical space: the baffling impasse at its heart rivals Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel, while hinting at the endgame of Iranian democracy. The poem was in fact adapted as a stage play by renowned actor and director Parviz Sayyad for the Shiraz Arts Festival in 1970, and has been restaged several times by Sayyad since. 

Falgoosh also prompts a closer look at Yektai’s response to the cultural questions unfolding in Iran. In the 1976 interview, he moves between Europe and Asia, modern and medieval, with cosmopolitan ease: “The lines used by Ingres or Seurat or Picasso, you also see them in Soltan Mohammad or Kamal-ed-Din Behzad or Reza Abbasi; on the surface of their colors, in the distances, in the way they hold the masses on the page. I don’t want to lose these in my own work … I consider myself as an inheritor of the legacy of miniature painting.” The reference is to the overall composition and saturated colors of traditional Persian painting, and its curvilinear abstractions of flora and fauna—key influences for artists like Matisse, and central to histories of European abstraction, as Yektai intuitively understood. 

“What I take from miniatures,” Yektai continues, “is … their truth. … I work with the truth and technique that is possible for me today, which is the technique that we have imported from America and Europe.” Yektai is making an important distinction, between visual imagery and visual logic. His acknowledged reliance on a Euro-American matrix (which he characterizes as “oil paints from England, brushes from Holland, a perspective and sensibility that the West has given us”) may feel obvious, but it is precisely what set him apart, especially in the mid-seventies, from many of his Iranian peers—from Shahroudy, who had begun working with craftsmen trained in traditional mirrorwork, or from Ziapour, whose youthful admiration of Cubism had translated into folk-inspired portraits of villagers in traditional costume. Most palpably, it set him apart from younger Iranian artists who had inaugurated, in the early 1960s, what became known as the Saqqakhaneh movement, an approach that brought a Nouveau réaliste interest in everyday objects to traditional Iranian artforms, themes, and subjects. Supported by the Iranian state from its inception, the Saqqakhaneh would go on to become one of the most recognizable, and collectible, movements in twentieth-century Iranian art. 

The urgency of these issues was already clear in 1976. Yektai’s interviewer asks him how he feels about the new trend toward “national, local markers” and “traditional principles of painting.” (“You might prefer not to answer,” he adds diplomatically, “but I must ask, because for us at least it’s important.”) Yektai’s response is unequivocal. “This is a local issue, not a global one, and it’s not a healthy subject either,” he begins. “It is absolutely not possible to keep something on a canvas by force or will, to bring it into a canvas and make it true. The truth must [be allowed to] create its own demands. I can’t make a painting from a superficially Iranian form. If I paint a qalyan [water pipe], I’m only following my feelings; if I bring it in deliberately, because it’s Iranian, I’ve taken away from the force and authenticity of the painting. I see no point in this kind of local imagery.” Then, as if realizing the scope of the critique implied in his words, and the friends and acquaintances it reflects on: “Naturally, if a roobandeh [a traditional face covering] is in keeping with how someone feels, that’s of course not a problem.” 

“The core of [Yektai’s] aesthetics,” Fereshteh Daftari writes in her definitive history of contemporary Iranian art, “is anchored in formal terms, in the context of New York Abstract Expressionism, and in the discourse of the time around abstraction versus figuration and materiality.” This was a discourse, she demonstrates throughout her book, as important in Tehran as in New York, but with unique contours in each setting. Yektai’s career, by his own account, was dedicated to the pursuit of contemporaneity in painting, to visual experiences reflective of their historic moment. But his understanding of history was ultimately rooted in the postwar milieus of Tehran and New York. At the Academy, he sided with imagination and freedom; in New York, he figured out how that search might be brought to life on the picture plane, and spent the rest of his career exploring its permutations. 

It feels difficult, at a time when the coordinates of an artist’s identity—their representation on behalf of cultures and experiences and communities—pose such urgent questions, to understand Yektai’s dismissal of “local forms.” His pursuit of universal, timeless truths is especially contradictory given the degree to which US critics considered him an exemplary ambassador (rare is the review that fails to mention his background) and Iranian historians a “contemporary pioneer” of a national tradition. But contradictory reception is also what makes him a complicated figure, and his work and life worth investigating from a contemporary standpoint.

Yektai stands at the beginning of a lineage that almost any Iranian painter imagines inhabiting, at least once: a line that runs from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first, that centers the eye while privileging the subjective, that holds out for visual beauty and sensory surprise. But more importantly, his pursuit of the truths in painting embodies the belief—unpopular perhaps, but still urgent for many of today’s young artists, regardless of their identifications—that formal experimentation should be allowed the privilege to play. The long arc of Yektai’s career demonstrates, with steadfast commitment, the joys of being allowed to shrug off the burdens of the messy, politicized world that any painting is born into. That such a pursuit may feel precarious, if not downright impossible today, may well be Yektai’s most valuable lesson for us. “The truth is, Yektai has always been yekta,” an Iranian critic has written: meaning, unique.

NOTES

1. Yektai, directed by Shirin Saghaie, VOA Portraits, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=TcH0fNqMHM4, my translation.

2. “That Lyricism Called Painting: Aydin Aghdashloo interviews Manoucher Yektai,” Rastakhiz, 1976; reprinted in Herfe-Honarmand 15 (Spring 2006): 131–37, my translation.

4. Hilton Kramer, “The Figures of Yektai,” Arts Magazine (September 1962): 34.

5. Manoucher Yektai, Falgoosh (Tehran: Rowzan Publications, 1970), 8, my translation.

6. Ahmad-Reza Ahmadi, “Manoucher Yektai: Poet and Painter,” Kelk: Art & Architecture 41 (July–August 1993): 98, my translation.

7. “That Lyricism Called Painting,” 133.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 136.

10. Fereshteh Daftari, “Modernism(s): Contextualizing the Terms of Discussion,” in Persia Reframed: Iranian Visions of Modern and Contemporary Art (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 18.

11. Dariush Kiaras, “Profile: Manoucher Yektai,” Tandis 16, no. 134 (September–October 2008): 4–5, my translation.