Words and Images in Contemporary Iranian Art

In the paintings of Sadegh Tabrizi (b. 1939, Tehran d. 2017) and Reza Reinei (b. 1968, Tehran) one finds tradition and modernity, the Middle East and the West, held in dynamic tension. Both artists acknowledge the deep roots of contemporary Iranian culture in the nation’s Persian past, yet they seek to transform this history into something vibrant, vital and living. 

Taking motifs from manuscripts as the basis of their calligraphic and figurative works, Sadegh and Reinei use this established form as a frame in which to hang their innovations. Often centring around the relationship between word and image that is so particular to manuscript painting , their formal interventions become carriers of other negotiations: past and present, native and foreign.

Sadegh Tabrizi turned to Persian illuminations to find a new artistic language. He combined this treasured literary past with a style heavily influenced by European abstraction in order to reach a native modernism. His series of illustrations for the twelfth-century romance Koshrow and Shirin by Nizami Ganjavi mobilises a tale that reverberates through the history of Iranian literature yet seeks to make it relevant for contemporary audiences, engaging with the forms and concerns of modernism. 

The tale of Koshrow and Shirin has been pulled apart and recombined over the centuries. Nizami was not the first poet to tell this epic (half-fact, half-fabrication) yet his version of the legend is the most famous. His meter is characterised by a constant forward motion, pulling the reader to erotic and narrative revelation, climax, and ultimately, catastrophe. Tabrizi takes this up in his paintings: tension is created and then dissipated as lines and gazes coalesce, and there is the titillation of a voluptuous and brazen nudity. The handling of line and form is reminiscent of a Matisse or Picasso, the cloudy space in which all the action occurs the insistently flat and anti-illusionistic surface of modernism. 

Koshro and Shirin, Sadegh Tabrizi

Ink, gouache, paint, and pencil on vellum laid to paper

Sadegh Tabrizi graduated from the College of Decorative arts in Tehran in 1964. He emerged into an art world in flux. Reza Shah Pahlavi’s modernising reforms had swept through Iranian culture, creating generation caught between local traditions and global modernity: turned both inward and outward, forward to the future and backward to the past. One can see the evidence of a self-conscious programme, aimed at establishing an Iranian modernism ‘on its own terms’, in the new Tehran Biennial. Founded in 1958 under the direction of Tehran’s General Administration of Fine Arts, the Biennial provided a global stage for Iranian art. All of the exhibited artists were Iranian; however, the jury was partially drawn from outside the country, showing a desire to weave together tastes and cultures.

This tentative acceptance of the West into the Iranian art world and market mirrors the selective adoption and adaption of Western thought in artistic practice. In Sadegh Tabrizi’s calligraphy, the artist uses an attachment to pure form in order to expand the strict tradition into which these works sit. As writing, calligraphy was tightly bound to religious practice, and occupied a position more similar to ‘craft’ than to the Western concept of fine art. By reconceptualising the practice as a formal exercise, within the logic of abstraction, Tabrizi was able to cut through this lineage and open up new possibilities.

In an untitled painting from 2010, inky brush strokes roll across a gold ground. It is as though each mark has been loosened from the word that contained it: set free by the artist into pure abstraction, they celebrate with playful abandon. The structures that have (quite literally) held calligraphy down have been lifted: the weight of anatomy and legibility vanish and, in their place, emerges a celebration of line and composition. 

Untitled, Sadegh Tabrizi

Ink on Skin

Such an approach is typical of Saqqakhaneh: a neo-traditional movement of Iranian modern art originating in the 1960s. Artists borrowed elements from votive Shi’ite visual culture with magpie-like abandon, cloaking them in a modern, often Westernised, forms. Calligraphy was a favourite subject of the school. Words were quite literally made into images: moving out of language to become purely pictorial constructions.

This use of script reveals the interaction between the western and the modern. Once script was liberated from literary content, calligraphy could be enjoyed even by those who did not read Arabic. Sadegh’s paintings are appealing in their sensuousness: they evoke emotion rather than intellectual and spiritual contemplation. His indulgence in pure form is tied only by a thread to the history of calligraphy, his works bearing only a visual and technical resemblance. In seeking to move past this dead weight of history, Sadegh also abandons language, perhaps the thing that would most root his art to the land. To be modern therefore, is to be interested in the visual not the written, to choose Western abstraction over Islamic text. 

Untitled, Reza Reinei

This was a choice – a pragmatic decision which instrumentalised the West as much as Iranian tradition in order to bring about a new language of art – and one that was based inthe specific context of pre-revolutionary nation, in which political reform was also enacted within these same dichotomies.

After the 1979 Revolution, and the establishment of an Islamic Republic, there was a change in the approach of Iranian artists to their Persian heritage. Artists appeared to cling more tightly to tradition, finding in the history of their craft a precious link to the religious roots of the new state. After studying Painting at Tehran University, Reinei gained a masters from the Calligrapher’s Association, becoming a teacher there in 1991. The younger artist’s work is characterised by a self-conscious regeneration of traditional Persian motifs and materials. 

An untitled work from 2015 depicts three figures who, with their elegant poses and ornate costumes, might have been plucked from a sixteenth-century miniature. But this no more revives the past than Sadegh Tabrizi’s works, rather it is a reinvention consistent with the terms and desires of the times. Whilst the Islamic content and Persian heritage is emphasised, it is with a touch of irony and instability that calls up postmodern interventions in Europe and America.

Calligraphy, rather than being simply the bearer of narrative content, becomes an agent of the story in its own right. Letterforms invade the canvas, forming a dark cloud that threatens the figures below. The toes of the central figure lightly touch the edges of this black band, his eyes fixed on the encroaching crowd, setting up a physical relationship that goes beyond the surface of the canvas. This is a knowing interaction with the culture of a globalised world, but from a position which gives more credit to certain areas of tradition and a play of nationalistic interiority.  

Indeed, the ‘Golden Age’ of miniature painting from which Reinei draws inspiration was already seen as westernised in its day, further underlining the continuation of selective adoption and adaption in relation to influences outside of Iran. East and West, modern and traditional, none of these concepts are absolute monoliths, but shift over time producing new stakes for engagement and revitalisation.

Reinei’s classical training and practice are consistent with Naqqashi-khatt, which emerged in the 1970s as a strategy for rethinking the conceptual and visual parameters of calligraphy. Writing was the focus of the work, rather than just a visual element to mine for inspiration. These artists were inspired by the innovations of Saqqakhaneh, however, they sought to enrich rather than denature calligraphic forms, treasuring the literary, spiritual and narrative concepts as much as the abstract shape of words. Painting was approached as much as a craft as an ‘art’; rather than taking on the role of the ingenious freer of form, the artists had to adhere to rigid traditional standards of anatomy and legibility.

But this is not to say that Sadegh Tabrizi’s forms are vapid and westernised in comparison with Reza Reinei’s meaningful and authentic paintings. Instead one can see shades between where the sense of script as a graphic gesture blurs with it as carrier of deeper significance. Both artists have different agendas in their dealings with text, but each seeks to re-energise tradition by selecting outside influences and filtering them into their work. In this process, script is what is moulded, bearing witness not only to the revival but to the terms in which it is enacted. 

Both Tabrizi and Reinei have instead enlivened Persian painting by challenging the physical boundary between word and image: one through modernism, and the other by a tongue-in-cheek historicism. Whilst one might be tempted to sum up the contrast between the two as a battle between the search for a modern identity through abstract art, and the quest for traditional Iranian expression, this would be an oversimplification. One cannot draw the boundaries between the pre- and post-revolutionary era so strongly: like the border between word and image, it is instead a story of slippages.

In Iranian art the real fault lines lie between the past and the present, the west and the non-west, and the relationship between word and image has proved a fruitful stage upon which to work out these tensions. Each artist plots his or her own course through these issues. Calligraphy’s graphic quality can be claimed as both traditional and modern, attuned to western abstraction or in service of traditional narrative and spiritual concepts. Words are alternately alongside images, within images, or images themselves.