Explore Modern Iranian Art

The following text is excerpted and adapted from Lynn Gumpert's foreword for Modern Iranian Art: Selections from the Abby Weed Grey Collection at NYU, published by the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name in fall 2013.

Please scroll to the bottom of this webpage to find links to a variety of scholarly resources on modern Iranian art, including additional essays and an expansive bibliography.

In 1998 Shiva Balaghi, Peter Chelkowski, and Robert Dannin from New York University’s Kevorkian Center and Department of Middle Eastern Studies proposed that the then-Grey Art Gallery, the university’s fine arts museum, present an exhibition of photographs by Abbas, an Iranian photojournalist living in Paris, in 1999 to mark the 20th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. In the 1970s, Abbas had made a series of trips to his native country to record the shifting financial and political ramifications of the rapidly expanding oil industry. One visit in 1978 coincided with the outbreak of social unrest and violence that culminated in the 1979 revolution. Abbas, a Magnum photographer well-known in Europe and the Middle East, had never had a solo show in the US; the proposed selection of his photographs included a number of iconic images as well as some that were shocking in their stark depiction of brutal events. 

After much thought, discussion, and collaborative efforts spanning four years, the exhibition was enlarged to include some 30 paintings, sculptures, and drawings from the Abby Weed Grey Collection of Modern Asian and Middle Eastern Art at NYU, along with a few key loans from New York’s Museum of Modern Art; a selection of Iranian revolutionary posters; and 34 black-and-white photographs by Abbas. Thus, the exhibition Between Word and Image: Modern Iranian Culture, which opened at the Grey Art Gallery in September 2002, presented three distinct but interrelated aspects of visual culture: fine art, posters, and photographs. It was the first exhibition of Iranian art to group together these three mediums, and the first to examine what Shiva Balaghi termed an uneasy tension between the traditional (often characterized as native, primitive, and/or Islamic) and the modern (seen as imported, mimetic, and/ or secular) during the key two decades of the 1960s and ’70s in Iran. [1] Accompanying this groundbreaking exhibition was the book Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution, which was co-edited by Professor Balaghi and Lynn Gumpert (Director, 1997–2025). It featured essays by Professor Balaghi on the nature of modernism in the Middle East and on Abbas’s photographs of the Iranian Revolution; the first survey of 20th-century Iranian art in English by Fereshteh Daftari, a co-curator of the show; a discussion of the revolutionary posters by scholar Haggai Ram; a consideration by Peter Chelkowski of how the posters—as well as postage stamps and banknotes—took on a new role after Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980; and my introduction to Abby Grey including an account of how her collection of some 700 works of modern Asian and Middle Eastern art came to the Grey Art Gallery, which she founded and endowed in 1974. [2]

The story is, indeed, an unexpected and unusual one. In the some fifty years since the now-Grey Art Museum was established, this trove of works—including more than 200 by Iranian artists—has taken on new relevance as we in the West have, at long last, come to appreciate and acknowledge the contributions and subtleties of non-Western modernisms. As Fereshteh Daftari notes in her landmark essay "Another Modernism: An Iranian Perspective": 

"This other modernism, like many of the culturally specific modernisms that emerged around the globe, was neither synchronous nor synonymous with the one constructed in the West. Its impulse being at the same time nationalistic and internationalist, it looked inward as well as outward. In art its languages included realism and abstraction, but formal issues were not its primary problems: the fundamental questions addressed by Iranian modernism had to do with the notion of identity.” [3] 

Particular to modernism in Iran is its relationship to specific conditions and events that transpired there during the course of the 20th-century. [4] In 2002, Professor Balaghi observed: 

“The construction of modernity in Iran was an act of resistance and creation. It entailed seeking out new ways in which the arts could engage social and political concerns. In the 1960s and ’70s, Iranian visual artists began to appropriate the traditional role of the poet as Iranian society’s conscious and all-seeing critic. In this sense, Iran’s visual culture of this period is an archival record of the social and political problems that were emerging; it serves as the artistic pre-history to the Iranian Revolution of 1979.” [5]

At the Grey Art Museum, the staff continues to further scholarship on and increase access to its unparalleled collection of modern Iranian art—the largest institutional holdings outside Iran. As we learn more about the varied works in Mrs. Grey’s collection, her prescience becomes all the more impressive. Working in a university museum, we at the Grey realize both the privilege and the obligation to honor her vision, ensuring that the artworks she treasured will continue to be seen and studied well into the future.

END NOTES

1. See Grey Gazette 6:1 (Fall 2002), which accompanied the exhibition Between Word and Image.

2. Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002). To be reprinted.

3. Fereshteh Daftari, “Another Modernism,” in Picturing Iran, 81–82.

4. See Shiva Balaghi, “A Brief History of 20th-century Iran” in this Modern Iranian Art.

5. Quoted in press release for Between Word and Image, 2002. See also Balaghi, “Iranian Visual Arts in ‘The Century of Machinery, Speed, and the Atom’: Rethinking Modernity,” in Picturing Iran.