A new book introduces two Manoucher Yektais: the stateless, anti-historical Modernist painter and the poet writing narrative verse exclusively in Farsi [Persian].
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| Manoucher Yektai, "Tomato Plant" (1959), collection SFMOMA, gift of Louis Honig (© Manoucher Yektai, photo by Katherine Du Tiel). Courtesy Hyperallergic. |
How did the Iranian-born artist Manoucher Yektai — a narrative poet and still-life painter who died in 2019 at the age of 98 — end up lumped in with American Abstract Expressionism and its subspecies, famously termed “action painting”?
Answers to this question emerge in the biographical and critical essays in Manoucher Yektai (Karma Publications, 2022). Its contributors wrestle awkwardly with these counterproductive art historical labels while setting the record straight about the Iranian-American poet and painter who won critical acclaim among New York’s avant-garde of the 1950s — Harold Rosenberg was a fan, as was Mark Rothko — before Yektai slid out of favor, even as he continued to write poetry and paint well into this century.
Featuring hundreds of color reproductions of Yektai’s work (he trafficked almost entirely in oil paint on canvas) along with personal photographs from a long life, Karma’s catalogue reveals a painter with a signature style refined across 70 years of disciplined output. Its hallmarks are deeply saturated colors, hyperactive impasto (often applied with a trowel and even a whip), and an all-over picture plane — he routinely painted standing over canvases placed on the floor, producing the illusion of aerial perspectives on the imagery. He applied these strategies to an early phase of pure abstraction and then to buoyant semi-abstract still lifes, developing that repertoire further to include portraiture, interiors, and landscapes.
