Inspired by art critic Karim Emami’s 1977 article “Saqqakhaneh Revisited,” which was highly influential in shaping Iran’s art history, this study seeks to revisit modernist Iranian art production to explore a more political and contextualized interpretation of modernism in Iran. A theoretical framework rooted in postcolonial critique and interwoven with iconographic analysis will help dismantle imperial notions of modernity and has the potential to decolonize modernist Iranian art history. This approach will allow us to see that Iranian modernist art was not simply a local implementation of universal modernist practices but a highly diverse field of cultural production that negotiated and reflected upon questions of modernity and modernization as practiced in Iran. Modernist artistic expression was closely tied to both a critique of the adaptation of Western modernity, articulated using the term “westoxification” (gharbzadegi), and the country’s political struggles for liberalization and democracy.

In recent decades, art historians have established an accepted canon and trajectory for modernist Iranian art. Modeled after stylistic categorization and terminology of European art history, this canon has established a hierarchical order of modernist art and narrates a story of modernism’s evolution in Iran based on the idea of linear artistic progress. However, a methodology dominated by biographical study and formalism largely detaches Iranian modernist production from its sociopolitical and sociocultural context of origin and places this art in a political vacuum. In this context, formalist art criticism and its focus on stylistic development became a decisive means of categorizing Iranian art as modern and secular and, thus, interacting with modernist art from Iran in the broader discourse of global modernity. This is reflected in the established canon of modernist art in Iran, which takes as its underlying and organizing principle the idea of artistic progress in the form of a common narrative about the evolution of modernism in Iran. It is, however, important to note the canon of modernist Iranian art does not simply represent a hierarchical order of formal and aesthetic qualities. Instead, as Elizabeth C. Mansfield points out, “the canon serves as a means to demark cultural and social boundaries.” As a “realization of a culture’s self-conception,” the art-historical canon “allows a society to visualize itself” and “gives material form to a society’s fantasy of collective identity.”Footnote ²

How have these boundaries become so widely accepted? What does it mean to write the history of modernist art in Iran? Whom and what interests does the depoliticized history of formalist progress serve? What are the contexts and purposes of a continuing formalist Iranian art historiography today? What is the artists’ agency in this discourse? What ideological significance did and do modernist artworks still possess?

Art historians typically identify the foundation of the Art Academy at Tehran University in 1941 as the beginning of modernist art in Iran. This is seen as the first indication of modernist artistic production because the foundation of universities happened in the broader discourse of Iran’s modernization programs and was an essential strategy for implementing Western modernity in Iran. This modernization becomes evident in the case of the art academy, which replaced earlier systems of artistic training with Western models of education. The director of Tehran’s art academy, the French architect and archeologist André Godard, developed the curriculum for artist education in Iran based on the teaching methods of the French École-des-Beaux-Arts system. Thus, students became familiar with Western art not only at the academy but also during their state-sponsored stays in European capitals, where they had the opportunity to deepen their studies and expand their knowledge about European contemporary artistic trends. After their return to Iran, the first generation of modernist artists experimented with techniques of Western modernism and adopted European artistic styles, such as Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, and abstract art.

Various art-historical accounts classify the period of the 1940s and 1950s as a time of asynchronous and often belated attempts to translate European artistic discourses into the Iranian context. For art history, however, this era of formalist imitation and experiments with Western modernity created the necessary technical foundations, which paved the way for the evolution of a local modernism. The resulting emergence of a specific Iranian modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, which is often seen as a skillful symbiosis of Iranian visual traditions and Western means of modernist expression, has often been interpreted as the pinnacle of Iran’s modernist art history. In these historiographical accounts, merging Iran’s visual traditions with the expression of modern Western forms signals the country’s successful modernization while preserving a specific national identity. After a short period during which modernism flourished, however, the linear art-historical narrative of Iran’s adaptation and appropriation of modernity comes to a sudden end with the rise of political Islam and the growing dissemination of revolutionary ideology, eventually leading to the Iranian Revolution in 1978/79.

The predominantly formalist methodological approach of Iranian art historiography, which often focuses on the aesthetic adaptation of modern European modes of expression, produces an art history based on stylistic divisions. This idea of Iranian modernism as a sign of the successful visual implementation of Western modernity played into the hands of official cultural politics. Under the monarchy of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1941–1979), cultural politics and the promotion of art and culture played a crucial role in communicating Iran’s successful modernization and secularization both domestically and abroad. In particular, modernist art became an important signifier for the efficiency of the state’s modernization programs. For their nationalist and westernizing ideology, Pahlavi cultural programs often used Iranian modernism as part of a power-political strategy to prove Iran was on its way to becoming a westernized nation-state. This became even more important after the events of Iran’s oil nationalization leading to the coup d’état in 1953, which shattered the country’s unstable political structures of secular democracy. Backed by British and US secret services, the coup overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. After the coup and the reinstatement of Mohammad Reza Shah’s royal dictatorship, the government established national surveillance systems to prevent a further “politicisation of the society,” as Ali Ansari explains.Footnote ³ After the political events of 1953, the monarchy became the most important patron for the promotion and exhibition of modernist art in Iran and institutionalized all fields of cultural production. In this regard, the institutionalization of critical voices against the monarchy became a power-political strategy for defusing any kind of oppositional criticism.

This instrumentalization of Iranian modernist art helped to strengthen the ideological bond with Iran’s Western allies during the Cold War. During this period, Cold War capitalist ideology promoted abstract art as a symbol of an allegedly universal culture. Peter Weibel explains, “The concept of a neutral universal culture, which the ruling cadres of the respective countries all tended to deploy, functioned as the pillar of the global system.” Based on the ideas of modernization and progress, “universal culture, a knowledge of the same languages, literary and visual works all became the fraternal signs by which the capital accumulators of the world recognized one another.”Footnote ⁴ In this context, modern and, in particular, abstract art played a crucial role in presenting this idea of universality. Modern abstract art was often seen as a symbol of freedom of expression and as a means of fighting totalitarianism. Thus, modern art helped propagate abstraction’s superiority over socialist realism in the field of art and Western capitalist superiority over Soviet Socialism in the political realm. In this way, abstraction was turned into an ideological weapon to construct a common Western identity that traversed countries and national borders and to communicate allegedly universal ideals of freedom and liberalism.Footnote ⁵ In this context, Iran’s appreciation of modernist art served as confirmation that it had the symbolic capital of “taste” necessary to recognize the universal language of Western modernism. Pierre Bourdieu explains that “material or symbolic consumption of works of art constitutes one of the supreme manifestations of ease, in a sense both of objective leisure and subjective facility.”Footnote ⁶ In the case of Iran, Bourdieu’s sociological analysis illustrates that culture not only functions in the realm of class distinction within a national society but can also be applied as political currency on a higher level to emulate Western nation-states and to move up in the global world order. Looking at modernist art, visiting museum exhibitions, and the general appreciation of modernism by the royal family in Iran thus helped to demonstrate that the monarchy and its royal members had “a relation of immediate familiarity with things of taste.”Footnote ⁷ This image was also deployed globally in foreign policy as a vital sign of the Pahlavi monarchy’s modernity and its “unconscious unity of class” with Western nation-states.Footnote ⁸

The institutionalization and instrumentalization of modernist art by the Pahlavi state established a powerful historiographical paradigm, which places modernist artistic expression from Iran in the service of the monarchy. In particular, both recent exhibition projects outside Iran and the exhibition activities of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) repeat this paradigm. In these contexts, modernist Iranian art plays a key role as a visual manifestation in memorializing prerevolutionary Iran as a westernized and secularized country. During this time, the Ministry of Fine Arts and Culture in Iran also supported the publication of art-historical overviews about the evolution of Iranian modernist art. In these books, contemporary art critics and art historians shared their first-hand findings and decisively shaped the field of formalist modern art history in Iran. This generation of writers tried to establish a different narrative, which reached further back and paid more attention to the intellectual underpinnings of cultural exchange, which has been forgotten in more recent approaches. One example of these formalist stylistic overviews is L’art moderne en Iran (1967) by the painter and critic Akbar Tajvidi, who locates the beginning of modernist art in Iran around 1890 when Iranian artists became familiar with Western arts during their travels to Europe. According to Tajvidi, from this point on, artistic experiences in the “contact zones” altered Iranian artistic production tremendously and introduced Western artistic means into the Iranian context.Footnote ⁹ According to Tajvidi, a short period of imitation allowed Iranian artists to catch up with developments in painting in European art history. After that, Iranian artists began merging Persian visual traditions, such as calligraphy and ornamentation, with modern Western art, achieving in this manner, according to the author, an unprecedented manifestation of artistic innovation and creativity in Iran.Footnote ¹⁰

In 1974, art historian Ruyin Pakbaz provides a more critical approach to the adaptation of Western modernism in Iran. He points out that the integration of Western artistic means dates back to Safavid times and significantly influenced Qajar painting. Despite earlier adaptations of Western aesthetics, Pakbaz considers only Iranian art after World War II modern because it marks a radical break with earlier artistic traditions, symbolizing “a battle of ideas … between the old generation and the new.”Footnote ¹¹ Throughout his book, Pakbaz follows the idea of a formalist evolution and categorization of Iranian art while also emphasizing the significance of nationalizing tendencies in visual art. For him, the artistic turn to Iran’s traditions was intended to create a specific version of Iranian modernism,

It is interesting to note that Pakbaz characterizes the incorporation of Iranian elements as “personal,” which implies the ideas of subjectivity and genius. “Subjecting influences from abroad” in combination with “painstaking critical analysis” of the universal European modern represent, for Pakbaz, a way to make the “latent national genius and creativeness” visible.Footnote ¹³ Despite his initial openness toward modernism, Pakbaz remains critical of the practice of modernist expression in Iran. For him, Iranian modernist art “lacks historical continuity” and could not fulfill its “declared objective of founding an ‘Iranian’ style.”Footnote ¹⁴ This is because “only a handful of contemporary Iranian artists have really understood their culture.”Footnote ¹⁵ For Pakbaz, the majority of Iranian artists produced only formalist artworks while ignoring the sociocultural and sociopolitical discourses of their time. In his numerous writings over the years, Pakbaz further elaborated his critical assessment of the practice of modernism in Iran, which was influenced by a Marxist approach and has shaped the field of modernist art historiography in Iran.Footnote ¹⁶ In particular, a younger generation of artists and art historians have critically questioned the adaptation and implementation of Western modernity in Iran, the monarchy’s ideological instrumentalization of modernist art, and the artists’ agency during this time. For many critics, such as the artist and writer Iman Afsarian, the discursive constitution of Western modernity and its claim to universalism were by no means applicable to the Iranian context. For Afsarian, Iranian artists tried to catch up with Western modernity in the art field due to a general inferiority complex surrounding the West. This catching-up, however, only took place on a visual and formalist level, without a “historical awareness” of the history of Western modernity or the Iranian sociopolitical context.Footnote ¹⁷

As will be shown in this book, opinions on modernist Iranian art vary greatly. For art historians, Hamid Keshmirshekan and Fereshteh Daftari, who have contributed tremendously to global scholarship on modernist Iranian modernism, the incorporation of traditional elements from Iran’s visual heritage represents a principal expression of identity politics. In these accounts, merging modernist expression with local Iranian traditions represents an artistic strategy for exploring a possible modern Iranian identity in the broader discourse of global modernity based on cultural difference.Footnote ¹⁸ However, this conceptualization of modernist art in terms of hybridity is also based on the dominance of formalism. It operates with the idea of merging universal elements of Western modernity with local traditional expression. Consequently, Iranian creativity and artistic innovation originate within Western modernity’s framework, which in turn reaffirms Western hierarchies.

A closer look at various contributions to Iranian art historiography reveals that these accounts operate with varying concepts of modernity and modernist art production. In this regard, two major views on the adaptation and appropriation of modernity in the Iranian context can be extracted from the existing historiography. The first concept is based on the idea that Iranian artists fully adapted modernist expression by means of assimilation and mimicry. The second model suggests that the search for an Iranian version of modernism was achieved on an aesthetic level through cultural mixing. Yet, as different as the positions may be, whether they support or oppose the government of Mohammad Reza Shah and whether they promote the idea of Western modernity’s completion or its failure in Iran, it is a politically motivated formalist understanding of modernist art from Iran that prevails. The dominant perception of artistic production from this period is that it was secular, westernized, and modernist. According to art historian Shiva Balaghi, a formalist methodology leads, in this regard, to the concealment of the artists’ political engagement and their struggle for liberalization. Balaghi explains,

This points to a third model of modernity in Iranian visual art, in which the merging of Western elements with Iranian visual traditions was not a formal but an analytical artistic strategy. Due to formalism’s dominance, the analytical and critical deployment of a simultaneously intellectual and aesthetic language has been widely neglected in Iranian art historiography. This study tries to alter the general perception of modernist Iranian art as mere visual experiments with Western means of expression and to situate it within the social and political context of its origin by means of a contextual approach to art history and a critique of formalism.

In the years after World War II, the formalist approach flourished as the leading methodology in the reception and analysis of modernist arts. Art critics such as Clement Greenberg contributed significantly to formalism’s success in establishing itself as the dominant method in modern art history. Focusing solely on formal-aesthetic qualities of modernist artworks, formalist criticism conceals the interdependent correlation between art and its social and historical frameworks. For Greenberg, art’s sociopolitical contexts compromise the ideals of modernisms’ aesthetic autonomy and pureness. Due to the continued dominance of formalism, nonformalist approaches began sprouting up in the 1950s, and a countermovement started in reaction to the formalist agenda. The proponents of nonformalist art history followed a more contextual and synthetic approach by taking the historical circumstances of artistic productions into account. The debate about formalism and politics in art history reached new heights in the 1990s when advocates of nonformalism criticized formalist art history as a means of depoliticizing artistic practice and neutralizing art’s critical implications.Footnote ²⁰ For instance, the art historian Deniz Tekiner argued that the formalist methodology and its concealment of art’s social implications serve capitalist market interests. For Tekiner, the focus on art’s aesthetic qualities confirms “the prevailing system of art commodity exchange and its ideology” and transforms artworks into “objects in commodity relations.”Footnote ²¹

In the case of Iranian modernist art, the close ties between formalist criticism and the state’s instrumentalization of modernist art led to its interpretation in a political vacuum. The idea of art as a symbol of Iran’s successful modernization has shaped the reception of this artistic production to this day. This, in turn, shows that modernist Iranian art has evolved out of a complex discursive construction of Iranian modernity and points, in fact, to art and politics’ close relationship with and interdependence on one another. Chantal Mouffe writes,

The French philosopher Jacques Rancière holds a similar view of the relationship between art and politics. Rancière writes, “art is not, in the first instance, political because of the messages and sentiments it conveys concerning the state of the world” but rather because “the specificity of art consists in bringing about a reframing of material and symbolic space.”Footnote ²³ With this in mind, the depoliticization of modernist art and its interpretation as aesthetic evidence of art’s autonomy indicate a questionable concept of modernity. The underlying idea of modernity “tries to retain the forms of rupture, the iconoclastic gestures, etc., by separating them from the context that allows for their existence: history, interpretation, patrimony, the museum, the pervasiveness of reproduction.”Footnote ²⁴ Rancière strongly criticizes the modernist narrative and its obsession with the “new” and art’s alleged radical break with representational styles. He even states that these notions of modernity “have been deliberately invented to prevent a clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationships with the other spheres of collective experience” and help to stage modernist art as a symbol of artistic autonomy and universality.Footnote ²⁵

This is reflected, especially in the case of Iran, in the way the institutionalized discourse of modernist art took hold of and materialized artistic expression as visual evidence of the state’s successful modernization, westernization, and secularization. The concept of secularism is closely tied to Western modernity and denotes an assumed neutral separation between religion and politics. It encompasses multiple historical, cultural, and regional conceptions but was mainly developed in Christian contexts.Footnote ²⁶ This poses the question of secularity’s applicability to non-Western societies. In most cases, colonialism and imperialism formed the relationship between secular and religious realms in non-Western countries.Footnote ²⁷ This is also the case for Iran, where modernist Iranian art shows us the limits of Eurocentric concepts of secularity and modernity.

Both for the Pahlavi regime, as well as for contemporary art historiography, Iran’s discourse on artistic modernity evolved from an ideological closeness to the West. As we have seen, Iran’s modernist art history rests on similar pillars, such as canon, styles, and linear history of progress, which support the idea of the autonomy of Western modern art. According to the curator and writer Okwui Enwezor, “the very notion of proximity to the West,” which was a result of global power politics, represents the interpretation and reception of non-Western modernities “a double-edged sword.”Footnote ²⁸ For Enwezor, this idea comes into play because the “sword cuts a swath between the revolutionary and emancipatory portents of the postcolonial critique of master narratives and the nationalist rhetoric of tradition and authenticity.”Footnote ²⁹ For this reason, Enwezor suggests a “postcolonial response” to the new emerging interest in the field of non-Western modernities based on the idea that, “in its discursive proximity to Western modes of thought, postcolonial theory transforms this dissent into an enabling agent of historical transformation and thus is able to expose certain Western epistemological limits and contradictions.”Footnote ³⁰

This observation leads to a broader question: How can we even study modernist Iranian art? How can one write the history of Iran’s artistic modernity while being aware of the “darker side of modernity,” such as colonialism, imperialism, and universality?Footnote ³¹ To avoid these ideological pitfalls of Western modernity when studying Middle Eastern modernities, the art historian Prita Meier suggests that rather than “simply include the non-Western into the modernist canon,” art historiography should try to “disrupt the foundational assumption of modernist art history that Western production is the universal norm.”Footnote ³² This assumption of Western universality rests on the problematic and paradigmatic presupposition that “the modern is just a synonym for the West” and that modernity is often staged as the intellectual property of enlightened Europe.Footnote ³³ This means that, for non-Western countries, “to become modern, it is still said, or today to become postmodern, is to act like the West,” as Timothy Mitchell explains.Footnote ³⁴

This demonstrates that the “classical” and static conceptualization of Western modernity is insufficient for more in-depth study of art histories outside the West. Therefore, it is necessary to reflect on theoretical concepts of modernity, which may help us consider the complexity and multitude of non-Western modernist art and liberate its artistic expression from constant comparison and tropes of imitation and belatedness.Footnote ³⁵ In particular, in the face of globalization, we must rethink concepts of modernity. Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, for instance, introduced his concept of “multiple modernities,” a term that criticizes the universal claim of European modernity and argues that “Western patterns of modernity are not the only ‘authentic’ modernities.”Footnote ³⁶ For Eisenstadt, modernity’s history represents “a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs.”Footnote ³⁷ Eisenstadt’s understanding of modernity as a form of culture allows different views on what makes a society modern. This theoretical premise opens up a critical perspective on Iran’s history and responds to the uncanny question: Is Iran modern? It explains that modernity in Iran was a continually evolving process, and the country’s search for its national traditions was not a break with modernity but instead, in its very ideological core, a product of the same modernity, which would also give rise to political Islam. Iran’s modern turn to “the invention of tradition” happened primarily within the Western episteme and is evidence of the transcultural moment of modernity in general and, in particular, of the transculturality of modernity in Iran.Footnote ³⁸

Transcultural modernity is reflected in Iranian modernist art, where processes of encounter, local translations, and adaptations decisively shaped vernacular artistic production. A transcultural perspective on modernist Iranian arts helps to challenge not only nationalist art historiographies but also binary divisions between the local and the global. In recent years, scholarship on global art history has discussed and explored theoretical concepts and possible ways the discipline might expand.Footnote ³⁹ For example, with James Elkins’s famous question, Is Art History Global?, art history started to reflect upon its limits as a field rooted in a Eurocentric framework.Footnote ⁴⁰ From the early 2000s, various art historians laid the theoretical foundations to establish theoretical tools for research on non-Western modernist and contemporary art. Most of these historiographical considerations are based on a global concept of modernity and follow a transcultural approach. The “more” global endeavors in art history often focus on the transnational transfer of knowledge, the migration of forms and discourses, and their interaction with local conditions during decolonization.Footnote ⁴¹

Global art theory and reconceptualizations of modernity build an essential framework for this study of modernist Iranian art and its aim of revisiting modernist Iranian art production. Nevertheless, analyzing Iranian modernism remains challenging for several reasons, including that modernist Iranian art does not yet have the specific scholarly framework of a scientific discipline. It is important to note that Iranian artists from the 1940s to the 1970s did not call their art “modern.” In their own and art-historiographical accounts, it is often called mo’aser, which means contemporary. In particular, the first generation of Iranian artists marked their radical break with past artistic traditions by naming their production “new art.” Art from this era, however, emerged in the broader discourse of Iran’s modernization. Thus, this kind of modernist Iranian art gained importance as a microcosm negotiating the complex question of how to be modern while also being Iranian in a newly established nation-state seeking its definition and recognition from Europe. For this reason, this study employs “modernist” as a general organizing term for artistic production, which uses modernist expression on an aesthetic level while dealing with the discursive constitution of “being modern” in Iran.

From a regional point of view, modernist art from Iran could be part of Islamic art history as a discipline that studies artistic and cultural productions in the broader Middle East.Footnote ⁴² Islamic art history, however, has neglected twentieth-century art produced in Middle Eastern countries. Having evolved from Orientalist and colonialist strategies of knowledge production about the West’s significant “other,” the discipline of Islamic art history instead created a canon that starts with the birth of Islam and ends around 1800, excluding the modern age. In his famous critique, Finbarr Barry Flood exemplified how “the ideological implications of the production of Islamic art” produced an imagined “golden age” of Islamic art before modernization.Footnote ⁴³ Flood points out that the exclusion of modern cultural production follows “the rise of neoconservative discourses emphasizing the failure of Muslims to make the transition to Euro-American modernity” while neglecting the enduring political repercussions of Western colonialism and imperialism on the region.Footnote ⁴⁴ Consequently, as Sussan Babaie writes, this “scarcity of scholarship on the period between the eighteenth and the end of the twentieth century and the absence of a sustained interrogation of the emergent modernities of the Islamic world” leaves modernist Iranian art production in a sociopolitical and sociocultural vacuum.Footnote ⁴⁵

This book tries to shed light on modernist art production from Iran and to illustrate the political challenges and artistic complexities of the period and is divided into four chapters. This study concentrates on Tehran as main site of Iranian art production. The capital became the center of artist networks, cultural-political debates, and exhibitions that shaped modernist Iranian art under the Pahlavi monarchy. A closer look at Iranian art historiography in Chapters 1 and 2 reveals how Iran’s modern history is remembered and reiterated. Chapters 3 and 4 attempt to retrace the histories ignored in contemporary exhibitions and overviews while focusing on modernist Iranian art production and its employment of modernist artistic formal language to address changing social and political conditions. Close analyses of selected artworks will help to establish a less formalist and more contextualized approach toward modernist art. It will be shown that these artists used modernist modes of expression not only for formal innovation but also as an essential means of responding to the political discourses of their time.

The first chapter examines contemporary exhibitions inside and outside Iran as historiographical sites of knowledge production about modernist Iranian art. A comparative perspective will show how these exhibitions repeated and strengthened the historiographical paradigm that modernist Iranian art production symbolizes the country’s successful modernization and secularization during Pahlavi rule. A close analysis will demonstrate that the depoliticized reading of Iranian modernist art in the respective exhibition contexts serves different contemporary political interests. With its focus on the formalist qualities of Iranian art, the exhibition Iran Modern, held in 2013 at the Asia Society in New York, represents a significant attempt to inscribe Iranian modernist art in the new emerging canon of global modernities. Evolved from the Iranian diaspora discourse in the United States, the exhibition addressed both the diasporic self and the other, that is, the host country. By celebrating Iran’s modernist art as a golden age of secularism, the exhibition functioned for the diaspora community as a metaphorical return to Iran’s prerevolutionary era.

The second case study looks at the canceled exhibition project The Tehran Modern, which was supposed to present artworks from Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection at the National Gallery in Berlin and the Museum MAXXI in Rome, as an example of the political instrumentalization of modernist art as a means of soft power. After many years of negotiations, the exhibition was supposed to be the crowning jewel of the successful nuclear negotiations with Iran in 2015. German officials, however, canceled the exhibition in December 2016 after several postponements of the artworks’ departure and delays in obtaining permission from the Iranian side for their export. German media suspected Iran’s troubled relationship with its modernity as the cause for the delays and, in the act of cultural politics, thus intentionally boycotted the exhibition. For this reason, the third part of this chapter will investigate the details of Iran’s refusal to send parts of its modernist collection abroad. Above all, it was Tehran’s art scene that mobilized opposition against the export of the works and the opaque preparations for the exhibition. Hence, the protests against The Tehran Modern exhibition can be seen as an expression of democratic culture in Iran, in which the art scene demanded transparency and a say in the country’s cultural policy and that the institutions of the Islamic Republic preserve Iran’s modern heritage.

The second chapter will delve deeper into the museum’s history and foundation under the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah. During the Pahlavi’s reign, royal patronage of the arts became an effective response to the growing critique of the Shah’s radical reformation programs, which materialized under the umbrella term gharbzadegi (westoxification). The critique formulated with westoxification contributed decisively to the politicization of Islam, which eventually led to the Islamic Revolution. In this context, it is important to note that Iranian intellectuals developed the concept of gharbzadegi through the lens of Western anti-Enlightenment philosophy. Gharbzadegi both denotes an anticolonial critique of repeated imperial interferences in Iran’s modern history and represents the most substantial criticism of Iran’s monarchy as overly westernized. The term came into full swing after the intellectual Jalal al-Ahmad published his essay, Gharbzadegi, in 1962.

For a deeper insight into Pahlavi cultural policy, this section will analyze the architectural design of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, showing that the instrumentalization of art and architecture helped to communicate the new ideology established by the Pahlavis. To alter the perception of modernist art in Iran as a mere illustration of Pahlavi modernization, the last part of the chapter will introduce al-e Ahmad’s art criticism. These texts demonstrate that his attempt to establish a significantly different version of Western monarchy also included the field of modernist art. As important source material, his texts reveal that modernism was less a kind of formalist experimentation with Western modernity and more a new artistic language that provided Iranian artists with new means of expression to address social and political themes of their time.

The idea of Saqqakhaneh plays a key role in Iranian art historiography because the artistic group represents the first successful translation of global modernism into the Iranian context. Saqqakhaneh is considered the first movement that moved beyond the belated imitation of Western artistic styles and established a local modernism rooted in Iranian visual traditions. To shed light on a possible definition of Saqqakhaneh, Chapter 3 will examine artworks and various written sources associated with Saqqakhaneh. Saqqakhaneh was not a self-styled art movement, nor did the artists share a common aesthetic program. The multiple designations of Saqqakhaneh as a school of modernism, an artistic group, or even an independent art movement reveal no uniform definition of the term. This leads to the conclusion that art historiographical processes were more influential on the evolution of Saqqakhaneh as a category than the artists’ actual collaboration. Recognizing this distinction gives an important insight into the complex and shifting politics that prepared the ground for the reception of artworks connected to Saqqakhaneh. As a celebration of the Pahlavi monarchy’s liberal sponsorship of art and culture, these works play a crucial role in the memorialization of prerevolutionary Iran.

The fourth and last chapter introduces the Fighting Rooster Association, which was founded in 1948 by the painter Jalil Ziapour (1920–1999), the writer Gholam Hossein Gharib (1923–2003), the playwright Hassan Shirvani, and the composer Mortezza Hannaneh (1922–1989). A closer look at the Fighting Rooster’s artistic productions reveals that the first generation of modernist artists was already deeply invested in creating a specifically Iranian modernism. Until recently, art historiography considered Jalil Ziapour’s works as belated imitations of European modernist art resulting from an artistic immaturity concerning Western modernism. The artistic adaptation of French Cubism enabled Ziapour and the Fighting Rooster Association to elaborate a suitable visual vocabulary for creating an artistic subjectivity rooted in Iranian cultural heritage. In addition, it helped foster the Fighting Rooster’s political hopes and ambitions for Iran’s democratization and to proclaim an alternative national identity rooted in the country’s spiritual heritage to counter Iran’s adoption of modern Western rationality.

As a student at André Lhote’s private art school in Paris, Ziapour became familiar with the body of cubist thought, which was highly influenced by the antirationalist and antipositivist thought of the philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson’s antirationalist philosophy would become highly influential for these Iranian artists. The members of the Fighting Rooster translated Bergson’s metaphysical ideas through Sufi tropes into the Iranian context. In light of Orphic Cubist theory, this chapter traces the transcultural moments of Iranian modernist art and the global interrelations of modernism. As will be shown, far from mere imitation, the Iranian translation of Cubism represents the search for Iranian art beyond Orientalism and exoticism.