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.