Iranian art in Dubai

Shiva Balaghi in conversation with Stephanie Bailey
Art Dubai 2014: Global Art Forum 8

by Stephanie Bailey, Ibraaz

In March 2014, Ibraaz and the Kamel Lazaar Foundation launched an online media partnership with Art Dubai 2014 for the eighth iteration of the Global Art Forum.  

In this exclusive interview from Art Dubai, Ibraaz Managing Editor Stephanie Bailey talks to Shiva Balaghi, a scholar in Iranian cultural history, about Balaghi's work with the collection of Mohammed Afkhami and the practice of collecting Iranian art.

Stephanie Bailey: We are here with Shiva Balaghi, a scholar in Iranian cultural history who has just spoken at the Global Art Forum on her work with the collection of Mohammed Afkhami. Shiva, one thing I wanted to ask you about was the notion that you put forward: the collection as an archive. I wanted to ask you how this then relates to what you said about Mohammed Afkhami’s collection having the potential to show an alternative Iranian history.

Shiva Balaghi: Well, Mohammed has been collecting Iranian art in Dubai now for a decade, and he is particularly interested in Iranian politics and Iranian history, so in his collection he tends to gravitate towards those types of works of art. This book that Venetia Porter and I are writing about his collection – and the talk today was a little preview of that – really takes his collection as an archive of Iranian history, and says: what are the moments that Iranian artists from the 1960s to the contemporary period think are important? How do these artists reflect that history? And how does that history manifest itself in their artwork? So we really think of the art collection as an archive that presents an alternative history of Iran.  

SB: This leads on quite nicely to a date that you mentioned in your talk, 1962, which was the year that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired – was it two works?

The widening Gulf

On the explosion of Middle Eastern investment in Western art and an exhibition of Iranian art at the Asia Society

 

The Museum of Islamic Art. Courtesy James Panero and The New Criterion.

 

by James Panero, The New Criterion

 

A few years ago, I came as close as I’ll ever get to the center of the art world. Over Dover sole at Sant Ambroeus, a restaurant on the Upper East Side, I sat across from someone who might have been mistaken for an out-of-place young grad student. While she was at Duke, my lunch companion, class of 2005, had double-majored in literature and political science. Now at Columbia, she was pursuing a masters in public administration. Casually dressed, she looked as though she were on a study break from Butler Library. Her demeanor was reserved, a little shy, and serious. “It’s work all the time. Sometimes it’s just very difficult, but I think it’s doable,” she explained. The “art world’s most powerful woman,” as The Economist has called her, had much on her mind.

Between taking classes at the time and raising her family, Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, known as Sheikha Mayassa (a name that has a James Bond ring to it), runs the museum operations of Qatar, where she is the fourteenth child of the former Emir and the sister of the current one. “I’m still figuring out the best ways to do all this. I set up video conferences. I have my staff come to New York every month. Then I take classes,” she told me. Funded by the oil and gas riches of her principality, a thumb-shaped pile of sand that sticks into the Persian Gulf from the Arabian Peninsula, Mayassa has been leading an acquisition program that, by a wide margin, has recently spent more money on art than any other entity. “The small but energy-rich Gulf state of Qatar is the world’s biggest buyer in the art market—by value, at any rate—and is behind most of the major modern and contemporary art deals over the past six years,” The Art Newspaper wrote in 2011. On ArtReview’s 2013 “Power 100” list, which ranks “the contemporary artworld’s most powerful figures,” Mayassa is ranked number one.

Arts Writers Grantee Negar Azimi on “Bidoun” and the Iranian Avant-Garde

 

Merce Cunningham’s Persepolis, performed at the Shiraz Festival of the Arts, Iran, 1972. Courtesy Creative Capital

by Kareem Estefan, Creative Capital

Negar Azimi, whose project The Shahbanou and the Iranian Avant-Garde won a 2012 Arts Writers grant (Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program) in the book category, is senior editor of Bidoun, an award-winning publishing, curatorial, and educational initiative with a focus on the Middle East. Irreverent and conceptually adventurous, Bidoun magazine covers an eclectic array of art and culture: its latest, #28, features an interview with Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben about pets and animals, and a conversation with Larry Gagosian in which Azimi turns the art magnate’s attention away from the market to the Armenian diaspora of which he is an influential, but under-recognized part. In addition to her work with Bidoun, Azimi has written for Artforum, frieze, Harper’s, the Nation and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications. I asked her about what’s next for Bidoun and how the idea for her forthcoming book came about.

Kareem Estefan: Bidoun was founded in 2004 as a magazine focused on art and culture from the Middle East. Since then, it’s also functioned as a library, a curatorial initiative, and an educational space with arts writing workshops. Having expanded from a little-known publication to an internationally recognized hub for various critical and curatorial activities, can you reflect on Bidoun‘s mission and what’s next for you?

Negar Azimi: We’re approaching our tenth anniversary, so we’re currently thinking through where we’ve been and where we’re going. I think, in part, we hope to become an incubator for all sorts of projects. You’ve probably noticed that our version of the Middle East includes Los Angeles, Detroit, New Delhi…we’d like to carry this forward by nurturing projects with partners who, like us, think expansively about culture, whether they’re our own fantastic contributing editors or people from outside of our immediate network. It’s an exciting moment. We’re preparing an exhibition about Reza Abdoh, an Iranian-American avant-garde theater director who died of AIDS in the 1990s, for Artists Space. We’re also staging sort of the apotheosis of the Bidoun library for the 2013 Carnegie International. And we are in the final phases of translating Bidoun # 25, which was made in Egypt, to Arabic and thinking about launch events around that. We’re also going to launch a new web site, which is still in its planning phases.

Jackson Pollock’s Splashes of Paint From Iran

Iran Loans Jackson Pollock Painting for Centennial Exhibit at Tokyo's Museum of Modern Art

By Kelly Olsen, WSJ

The U.S. and Iran have been at odds for decades, with tensions escalating further this year amid talk of possible armed conflict in the Middle East over Tehran’s nuclear program.

But in Japan, a nation that tries to maintain good relations with both countries, a major exhibition featuring the work of one of America’s most recognizable artists is showing how appreciation for good art can bring even the most intractable foes closer together.

The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo has been holding a special exhibition to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of American abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock.

Visitors to the museum, located near the moat surrounding the leafy Imperial Palace in central Tokyo, are unlikely to be surprised that “Jackson Pollock: A Centennial Retrospective” has received what the museum describes on its website as “special support” from the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.

But the fact the exhibition, which wraps up a three-month run Sunday, is also “patronized” by the Embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran might raise a few eyebrows.

As it turns out, there is a good reason for Iranian involvement. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has lent a famous and extremely valuable Pollock painting it possesses, Mural on Indian Red Ground, for the current exhibit.

Clandestine Trade

By Melik Kaylan, WSJ

Two utterly disparate artworks now on view in Manhattan—a centuries-old masterpiece and a modernist grotesque of immense price—are linked by a history that has remained largely in the shadows. At the Metropolitan Museum's newly reopened Islamic galleries you can see the first, the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, or parts of it at least. A gloriously illuminated manuscript from the 16th century, generally considered one of Muslim civilization's foremost artistic expressions, it came to be known as the "Houghton" Shahnama. Why it is no longer called that, why the Met has some 78 of the initial 258 pictorial folios, and how and why the remainder of the original volume went back to Iran in a clandestine swap for the second artwork are all part of the story.

You can see that second work, simply known as "Woman III," at the Museum of Modern Art until Jan. 9 as part of "de Kooning: A Retrospective." Willem de Kooning's prominent place in modernist art needs no expounding here. Suffice to say the painting last changed hands, into the possession of hedge-fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, in 2006 for $137.5 million. Mr. Cohen purchased "Woman III" from entertainment magnate David Geffen, who had acquired it from the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1994 via a Swiss dealer. "Woman III" originally went to Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art in the 1970s during the last shah's time and had remained there since.

Up until 1994, the Shahnama's owner was Arthur Houghton Jr. of the Corning Glass Houghtons. He gave Harvard its Houghton Library and presided for many years as chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Philharmonic. Four years after Houghton's death in 1990, "Woman III" was exchanged for what remained intact of the Shahnama (118 paintings with 500 pages of calligraphy plus exquisite binding). That much is on the public record. And when the intricate deal was done and "Woman III" sold off, some $9.5 million went to the Houghton family trust. Virtually unknown, however, is the role of Arthur Houghton III in the stealthy deal—one that required steely nerves, considering his job at the time. A longtime foreign-service officer, he worked in an office of the White House, advising on international strategies in the war on drugs while Iran was still under an official U.S. embargo dating from the 1979-81 hostage crisis. Then, as now, relations between the countries were icy. The younger Mr. Houghton remembers the mood as "extreme hostility bordering on paranoia."

How I Lost My Leg in Tehran

by Barbara Rose, WSJ

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be cloned -- to have another you or part of you floating around somewhere in the world? Occasionally I have that strange feeling about my right leg, since I know that a flesh-colored cast of it exists, although at the moment I am not sure where. Originally, it was seen in "Passage II," a painting by Jasper Johns done in 1966.

As many writers have observed, Johns's paintings are littered with the body parts of his friends, who were convenient models. Taking the idea of asking a subject to "sit" for a painting literally, Johns sat me down on a chair and made a plaster cast of my bent leg when I was visiting in Edisto, S.C. My leg eventually appeared painted a realistic flesh color but turned upside down, pinned to the upper left of "Passage II," a painting containing objects, including neon lettering. The work was bought by the art-book publisher Harry N. Abrams and reproduced in the 1968 Abrams monograph by Max Kozloff.

In the early 1970s, the painting was sold by Mr. Johns's dealer Leo Castelli to Farah Diba, then the youthful Empress of Iran, during her art-buying spree. Before marrying the shah, she had been an art student in Paris and was an enthusiastic collector of contemporary art. After oil prices skyrocketed in the early '70s (sound familiar?), Iran was swimming in foreign money while the Western art market was suffering. Great masterpieces of modern art were cheap.

My leg was in good company: The collection the empress's agents assembled included two major Rothkos, two of de Kooning's finest paintings and other New York School masterpieces, including Pollock's "Mural on an Indian Red Ground."

Most of the collection, which had been in underground storage for almost 30 years, went on view in "Modern Art Movements," the historic exhibition held from June until October 2005 at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. My leg, on the other hand, was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps that's because female nudity is a big problem for the Islamic fundamentalists. Renoir's voluptuous female nude is also unaccounted for, but Picasso's large "Painter and His Model" -- containing a lumpy, distorted attack on the female figure that no one from any culture could deem erotic -- was prominently displayed.

The unprecedented show was a huge success. The first gallery was filled with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. There was a Gauguin still life, a rare Léger from 1913 and Picasso's synthetic cubist masterpiece, "Fenêtre Ouverte sur la Rue de Penthièvre," as well as his late cast bronze of a baboon cradling her baby, which is also in the Picasso Museum in Paris. There were circus performers by Georges Rouault as well as a daring watercolor by the German Dadaist George Grosz. Other European and American modern masters were on view with a special section devoted to Pop artists Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine. Also in the collection are sculptures by Magritte, Henry Moore and Giacometti; paintings by Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Georges Braque; and three important Toulouse-Lautrecs. Their exhibition in the museum designed by Farah Diba's cousin was a surprise to all.

Ever since Ayatollah Khomeini declared Iran a theocracy in 1979, censors from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance decide what will be seen in public places. They let the Picasso through but deleted a panel from Francis Bacon's triptych "Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendant" (on loan to Tate Britain, it was reclaimed for the show) as too risqué, so the painting was deprived of its offensive central panel.

Andy Warhol's portrait of Farah Dibah languishes in a damp basement underneath one of the former royal palaces, but his pouting Mick Jagger was there for all the chador-clad women and robed mullahs to admire. Most remarkably, an entire gallery was devoted to Abstract Expressionism, the art movement that proclaimed America's cultural primacy.

The story of Farah Diba's collection is worthy of a James Bond movie. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution forced the shah and his family into exile, palaces were thrown open and there were rumors that the nation's modern art collection would be sold to Kuwait. The revolution expunged activities deemed "Western," and the modern art collection became a mythical treasure trove, hidden from view like the grave goods in a pharaoh's tomb.

One event brought the existence of the collection back into the limelight. In 1994, de Kooning's "Woman III," an abstract nude, was secretly exchanged for the "Shahnameh," a priceless illustrated manuscript based on the epic Persian poem "The King's Book of Kings." The manuscript left Persia 400 years ago to end up in the collection of Baron Edmund de Rothschild, who sold it to an American collector in 1959.

By swapping de Kooning's nude for the "Shahnameh," the Iranian fundamentalist regime rid itself of a painting it would never show and regained a national treasure. The deal alerted the world to the existence of a priceless collection of modern art, buried in the vaults of the museum in Tehran.

The news made me wonder what had become of my leg. Although the official museum checklist lists several works by Jasper Jones (sic), the one titled "Passage I" has no image and the print titled "Pinion" is illustrated on the Web site by the complex, many-layered lithograph "Decoy." The large lithograph contains a photograph of the missing painting, so disguised that it is hard to tell if it is a woman's leg or a pink blob. "Passage II," which has not been seen publicly since it was purchased, is not listed as in the collection.

It is hard to say why, after being locked up for nearly 30 years, the masterpieces of modern Western art were exhumed and put on show. The decision might well have been a symbolic farewell by the reformist President Muhammad Khatami, preceding the transfer of power to Islamic hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was elected at about the time the show opened. The exhibition closed in October.

Until recently, a Web site told the whole story of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and its collection. A few months ago, temporary exhibitions were still being announced, although now they were of strictly Iranian art. Then suddenly the Web site went dark and the only link to it said "under construction." The site is now back up, announcing a new exhibition of Iranian photography, but continuing to list the works of modern Western art, including a number of prominent Jewish artists, as part of its permanent collection, which is presumably open to the public. Equally ironic is another exhibition of paintings by the well-known Jewish painter Marc Chagall, which opened in Tehran this summer even as President Ahmadinejad was calling for the destruction of Israel.

Today, some of the most original contemporary Iranian artists, such as Shirín Neshat, whose work is now banned in Iran, are living and working in exile in the U.S. And an exhibition of contemporary Iranian photography, organized by the Tehran museum, is touring U.S. museums without the blessings of either government. In this ironic and unwitting cultural exchange, Iran owns historic U.S. paintings that American museums cannot afford and the works of gifted Iranian artists are celebrated by American museums as the cutting edge of the avant-garde. No one knows what will happen to the masterpieces of modern Western art in Tehran. They are said to be worth billions of dollars now and are too expensive to be destroyed. Will they be sold or traded?

Which brings me back to my leg. Where is it now, I wonder? Did some fanatic realize it is a woman's and throw a cloth over its offensive nudity? Is it being held for ransom to be exchanged for a valuable Persian manuscript or an important weapon? Or was it lost or stolen? Every time I look down at my right leg, I wonder where its flesh-colored plaster-cast double may be.

Dr. Rose is an art historian who lives in New York and Madrid. Her book "Monochromes: From Malevich to the Present" will be released next month by the University of California Press.

" Every time I look down at my right leg, I wonder where its flesh-colored plaster-cast double may be. "

Via WSJ 

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art Puts Little Seen Modern Art Masterpieces on View

A woman visits the "Manifestations of the World Contemporary Art" exhibition at Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art. Artists like Monet, Picasso and Warhol were considered revolutionary in their day, but their works were not much appreciated by the leaders of Iran's Islamic revolution and many were kept out of view for decades. Now, one of the greatest collections of contemporary Western art -- put together under a Western-leaning monarchy in pre-revolutionary Iran -- is open to the public, with some works on display for the first time in more than 30 years. REUTERS/Morteza Nikoubazl.

By: Robin Pomeroy and Ramin Mostafavi

TEHRAN (REUTERS) - Artists like Monet, Picasso and Warhol were considered revolutionary in their day, but their works were not much appreciated by the leaders of Iran's Islamic revolution and many were kept out of view for decades.

Now, one of the greatest collections of contemporary Western art -- put together under a Western-leaning monarchy in pre-revolutionary Iran -- is open to the public, with some works on display for the first time in more than 30 years.

In the Islamic Republic, where the United States is considered the "great Satan" and its decadent music and movies are considered the products of a Godless society, the art exhibition is full of cultural contradictions.

The first paintings visitors to the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art see are of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, and his successor as supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- portraits that are compulsory features of all public buildings.

Below their austere gaze, a winding staircase leads down to what looks like an empty black plinth, but on closer inspection proves to be a modern art installation -- an open vat of crude oil -- the substance that paid for Iran's priceless collection.

The galleries of the stark concrete museum -- built especially to house the collection during the latter years of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's reign -- are works by pretty much every major Western artist of the late 19th and 20th centuries.

"Without exaggerating, Tehran's contemporary art museum has one the most important treasuries of artistic works in the world," said Ehsan Aghaie, executive manager of the exhibition which runs throughout the summer.

Past the French impressionists, the Van Gogh lithographs and the self-portrait of Edvard Munch, sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti litter the hallways.

Aghaie says the collection has been valued at more than $2.5 billion. Its most prized piece, "Mural on Indian Red Ground," a violent spatter of color painted by Jackson Pollack in 1950, fills half a wall.

The challenging works draw a crowd. "Iran is not separate from global community. (Modern art) is widely welcomed by people and when these works are exhibited the number of visitors rises dramatically," Aghaie says.

COCKTAIL
Women in chadors gaze at plain black canvasses with the same looks of incomprehension that similar "post-minimal" works inspire in visitors to galleries in the West.

A Picasso painting of the artist and his model is abstract enough not to risk offending prudish sensibilities.

A colorful meter-high bronze by Roy Lichtenstein looks like a giant glass filled with a fruity cocktail -- not a common sight in the Islamic Republic where alcohol is banned.

Next to it, one of the pop artist's cartoon-like paintings shows a fighter pilot picking off enemy planes.

The fantasy image is a world away from the grim eight-year Iran-Iraq war which followed the 1979 revolution and put such modern, Western art out of favor and into the storage vaults.

Portrayals of Iranian military might -- like the murals which still decorate Tehran's walls -- were the kind of art in vogue during the war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, backed by many of the Western countries which had produced the art.

Aghaie is keen to dispel the idea that Iran ever banished its Western art treasures, even though they were kept out of the public eye for years.

"Perhaps during war time, countries try to keep the epic sprit of their nations high. Therefore, there is more appetite for that kind of art," Aghaie said. "But it does not mean that there was no appetite for these art works."

"Even in the West, after World War II, war elements were more evident in artists' works, and Iran is not an exception.

"But this kind of art has never been rejected and Iranian people and authorities always liked them, that is why they are safe and sound and now you can see them," he said.

The collection, which contains around 4,000 pieces, was always stored in good conditions, even when it was kept out of sight, Aghaie says.

Iran's authorities have no desire to suppress the collection, he says, but there is simply no room to display them all at once. In future the museum may mount theme-based exhibitions, rotating the collection through various schools of art.

Leaving the museum, visitors once again pass the oil installation which fills the atrium with a mild smell of petroleum that employees at the gallery no longer notice, back into the polluted real-world air of Tehran where Iran's biggest export is put to a more conventional use.

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

Via artdaily.org

A Tehran Art University student looks at a painting by 20th century U.S. artist Jackson Pollock at Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art June 19, 2010.