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| Abby Weed Grey, Parviz Tanavoli (middle) and Sohrab Sepehri © Grey Art Gallery. Courtesy the British Council. |
Head of her last trip to Iran in 1973, Abby Weed Grey, the American midwestern widow who had by that time gathered the biggest international collection of Iranian modern art, wrote down her goals for the journey. ‘What I want from this adventure,’ she wrote, before answering, from one to five: ‘the rigors of travel, the demands of the strange, the unfamiliar, the accommodation of self to hosts, the retrieval of all this in new learning and enlightenment, the return home to “normal” with the least culture shock.’ She promised herself earnestly to make ‘actual progress in cementing of friendships’, and achieve ‘greater understanding of Persia, its culture and peoples’ and find new ‘fluidity’ for her poetry.
When she was a young girl growing up in Minneapolis, as a reward for her prowess in spelling, Abby Weed’s father gave her a copy of The Arabian Nights, in an illustrated edition published by the Scottish anthropologist Andrew Lang. Fifty years later, in 1962, she found herself at the studio of Parviz Tanavoli, spellbound by a giant painting in ink, gouache and gilt called Myth (1961). Inspired by the timeless story of Shirin and Farhad, it showed three figures: the legendary sculptor, Farhad; his apprentice, holding a mallet; and a gold and blue angel, with its wings open, protecting them. ‘For me, it went back to Arabian nights,’ she would write. ‘But of course, it was a Persian tale. I felt I had to have it and purchased it on the spot.’ It was the beginning of an enduring friendship between artist and patron.
With her US college friends, Abby Weed had laughed at ‘the ridiculous things we were being shown as contemporary art’, ‘outlandish’ works like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). She bought her first piece of art in college, a painting from an exhibition of works by Austrian children. At the age of 26, she married Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Edwards Grey, a West Point graduate and First World War veteran, twenty years her senior. He died of cancer in 1956, after a happy but childless marriage, leaving her a small fortune. After the ‘terrible blow’, the 54-year-old widow began to feel ‘a bewildering sense of freedom’.
