The Azari Family Collection, Iranian Modern Art, Christies, Dubai, Auction, Art, Zenderoudi, Pilram, Sepehri, Tanavoli, Eric Aari, Sheila Azari, Darius Azari, Marc Azari, Erica Azari, Michael Jeha, Christie's Dubai Lawsuit, Paintings, Artwork,
Topics:
Cut 3 narrative [or TLC 250 summary]
Let me tell you about the past
Eric and Sheila’s story
Moving back to iran
Archeology & Modern art
Artists’ profiles and anecdotal
Rahim Asa (done)
Charles Hossein Zenderoudi (done)
Sadegh Tabrizi (done)
Faramarz Pilaram (done)
Nasser Ovissi
Sohrab Sepheri
Parviz Tanavoli
Massoud Arabshahi
Conclusion
Iran Rev
Sheila’s death
Eric illness
Revival - The Lost Collection
[Opening 1 - picks up from video]
I went back to Iran in 1959 with the idea that we would visit my father and return to the United States. But my father died and I got involved in his business, trying to liquidate it at the very least. We stayed from 1959 to 1964 and we were very popular. So one of things we became involved with was collecting antiques. And through the antiques we started discovering new artists. They were young in their career, they needed promotion, they were not well known, so we decided to promote these artists. At our parties we would display their works in our house, telling ambassadors and generals and other guests that this was Iranian new art, and that it would help promote them if they bought the works, so we created the market for them. The more we got interested the more we acquired, with the idea that eventually we would start a museum of Persian art of a certain period because there was no representation of Persian art or culture.
Persians would buy out of a sense of obligation - hey, it was a persian artist, they didn’t care what the subject was - and the Americans and other expatriates were hungry for this material. They marveled at the fact we knew these artists, so we were international people in demand. So because of that there were a lot of stories at our parties where both sides would come because of who attended from the other side. If the American attachés were there, the Russians would try to insinuate their attachés so they could spy on each other. We were in a situation where everyone assumed we knew everything, and because of that we were the center of intrigues.
Our family came back to the United States in 1964. It was a time of rock and roll and sex, and a change of culture in the country. So we had some of that fever going on in our house. It was a party house and we did a lot of entertaining. We had famous neighbors like Nathalie Wood, and we had a combination of scientists parading through our parties, Nobel prize winners, heads of universities, politicians and Hollywood stars. The reason our collection feels like a time capsule, and that we have not done more with it during the last forty years is very simple: the Persian revolution is thirty years old this year. So out of necessity we could not try to introduce or explore our art and create a museum - the times were not right. Iranian art was totally in eclipse.
My wife Sheila passed away 14 years ago, and that took all the passion out of my artistic pursuit, and since then the collection has been gathering dust.
But this summary hardly does justice to the years Sheila spent building her incredible collection, or to the artists, the country and the culture that inspired them during a social and political context that now seems so remote.
Perhaps it is better if I start at the beginning and tell you about Sheila’s remarkable efforts and what I remember of the various players during the years leading up to the Iranian revolution of 1979. I believe she would want you to know.
I would also ask for your patience as you read these pages. In my recollections of the various artists I have relied both on Sheila’s formal descriptions from her papers, as well as more anecdotal information from my memory of those times forty years ago. The timeline moves back and forth rather fluidly because the material is grouped by artist, and not necessarily chronologically.
I was born in Iran 83 years ago. My Russian mother was a teacher with an appreciation of literature and the arts. My father was a self-made business man who travelled to Europe to learn production processes. He returned with the know-how to automate local brick production, and a few years later he emerged as a successful industrialist with interests in cement factories and building materials. My father was certainly unconventional. He was a free thinker, and he married a foreign wife without forcing her to convert to Islam.
My parents had a large variety of musicians and artistic people around them, probably due to my mother’s affinity for the arts. Iran was relatively poor in art at that time because of the religious prohibitions against graven images, among other things. At that time art was expressed mostly as literature, book illustrations, 19th century reproductions of European works, and rural folk art.
My father was receptive to the idea of my studying abroad. He hoped I would study petroleum engineering and return to Iran to a prosperous career in the oil industry. When I called to announce that I wanted to study physics, he and my mother agonized about what would become of me professionally. When I finally got my father’s blessing he rationalized it by saying that “if all else fails you can come back and become a diplomat”. In those times, it seems, if your interests did not lie within a few specific fields of endeavor, you became a diplomat.
With that in mind I travelled to Paris and then to New York where I was accepted by two universities and lived with my cousin Mida. She too was unconventional for her time. She was the first woman accepted to major in Political Science, she spoke five languages and was very popular on campus. She played various instruments and was a talented singer. She was the perfect persian cook and even wrote one of the first, if not the first, Persian recipe books in English. She went on the become an instructor and an advisor to the naval intelligence offices in San Francisco and later married a career diplomat (perhaps he was really a physicist). Their backgrounds assured them a lifetime of postings in exotic and challenging locales.
I traveled West to study physics at the University of California in Berkeley, and took up residence at the International House which was supported by the Rockefellers. It was there that I first met Sheila, a fellow student at Berkeley, and she was to have a profound impact on my life. Our interests on campus couldn’t be more different. I studied physics and eventually rocket engineering - inertial guidance systems and various command and control technologies. Sheila was an Art History major with a passion for a wide variety of creative expressions and Political Science. Our interests converged when we took some elective courses together. We chose art and drama courses and frequented many museums and artistic gatherings. I enjoyed the discussions and this laid the foundation for our pursuit of art when we returned in Iran some years later.
Sheila was my senior by 40 days and graduated two months ahead of me. To mark the occasion she invited me to her graduation party and proposed that we rent a sailboat in the San Francisco bay. I didn’t know how to sail, but Sheila did. Needless to say, we capsized in choppy waters and we both lost our watches (hers was a graduation present). After that we stopped talking to each other for a while, but we made up and were married a short time later. We started a family and had three children, a girl and two boys.
I was fascinated by science. It was an exciting time of technological discovery and expansion of the human experience in all fields of scientific endeavor. I knew I did not want to get involved in my father’s business and I was concerned that I would be obligated to work in his enterprise, especially if he passed away. But when he became ill I answered the call and returned to Teheran in 1959 for what I thought would be a short family visit. As a precaution, before leaving I signed a two-year contract with a fledgling American company - Teledyne - so that I would be able to resist any entreaties to join the family business. As fate would have it, my father took a turn for the worse and passed away before I arrived in Teheran. I had no choice but to get involved with his business, and from 1959 to 1964 I tried to liquidate various parts of it at the very least. Sheila and the children joined me in Teheran a few months later and we started an important new chapter in our lives. Those were prosperous years in Iran; construction was booming, there was a sense of openness and the country was on the move. The king had married a queen who had studied at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris, and she was artistically inclined.
To give you an idea of the social scene in Teheran as Sheila was arriving in December of 1959, this is from the Christmas card I sent to Sheila’s parents in the US:
“Greetings. There’s never a dull moment here, they’re calling it the Geneva of the East on account of the heavy diplomatic traffic - Nehru of India, Menderes of Turkey, Ayub Khan of Pakistan, Pinay of France, Edward R. Murrow, and so on in the period of only one month. And then Eisenhower’s short visit for which they had rugs laid out for ten miles from the airport to the royal palace. The royal wedding is next on the social agenda - tonight in fact - and there is a possibility that we may attend. Sheila is sick over what to wear on such short notice. The queen’s wedding gown is a scandal. It is a creation of Dior in Paris with a price tag of $50,000 not to mention the priceless tiara which has outraged as many as it has delighted. This afternoon she was escorted from her uncle’s house is Darrous, around the corner from our place, to the palace. We took pictures. The kids are fine, they are decorating the Christmas tree and Sheila will send you a detailed letter. Wish you were here, Happy Holidays and New Year”
Sheila and I became very interested in archeology. We started by learning about the pieces that were available at the bazaar and soon graduated to exploring to the actual sites that were being excavated in various parts of Iran. We collected many artifacts and antique jewelry, and learned about antiquities and their ancient motifs. Sheila spearheaded our efforts to discover the many forms of artistic expression that existed all around us.
We were also very active on the social circuit. We were young, vocal and we had the means to pursue our interests and to help those around us. Our popularity was due in some measure to our international and unusual backgrounds - Sheila was a Daughter of the American Revolution who traced her ancestry to the 12th president of the United States Zachary Taylor, and I was an expatriate Iranian physicist with a security clearance. Sheila entertained our guests from the various embassies as well as the business and military circles with local iranian musicians and avant-garde fashion shows - which were unheard of at the time. She knew that all the political, cultural and modernization changes afoot in the country must be reflected in an emerging contemporary art movement, and one by one Sheila sought out and discovered these artists, many of whom were working in relative penury and obscurity. She created a unique environment at our house, which became both an art gallery where people of all backgrounds could see a broad range of new works, and a salon where they could meet the artists and discuss their sources of inspiration late into the night. Our soirées were always well attended with one or two hundred guests, including notables such as General Hayden of the US Command, prime minister Hoveyda and a host of diplomatic personnel from the Indian and Canadian missions in Teheran. While Sheila was not in the art business per se the exposure she gave these artists certainly created a market for their works. We became collectors in our own right, often buying their pieces and we were happy to support their work. This is something we continued for over thirty years.
We were fascinated by the link between Iran’s archeological themes and the emerging modern art movement that incorporated Islamic religious art. Sheila believed the artists were only subconsciously aware that they were painting motifs from pre-religious legendary times. There were of course many artists finding their inspiration in Europe’s avant-garde movement like Picasso and Modigliani, but Sheila was interested in the ones that had continuity with Iran’s past and painted so-called Islamic art and this was reflected in almost all of their works. I believe Sheila discovered and brought about a new appreciation of contemporary Iranian art with her salon, and this created the impetus for Queen Farah’s decision to found the museum of Modern Art in Teheran with support from the Pahlavi Foundation. The Queen collected broadly and she significantly expanded the awareness of 20th century art among Iranians.
To say that the art scene in 1959 Iran was something of a disappointment would be an understatement [4878]. Most of what was available was mediocre “marketplace art” available in quantity for the tourist trade at the bazaar. The subjects were primarily clichés and stereotypical village scenes with donkeys and camels, or other primitive themes that appealed to the bazaar trade. Sheila resolved to find some real artists with quality pieces. She had heard of Marcos Grigorian, an Armenian Persian Christian artist who was aware of European art and who had set up the only western-style gallery in Teheran - Esthétique. We made a appointment to meet him there, and this launched the next chapter of what would become our lifelong adventure with Persian art.
Grigorian’s gallery was set up in a private residence, and he was indeed exhibiting his own pieces as well as compositions from other artists. Grigorian displayed his own art on the main wall of the gallery, but Sheila was not taken by his work - it was too “European modern” for her taste - but she did discover the contemporary Persian art she was seeking. There were only two pieces at Esthétique: one by Rahim Asa (he was there dropping it off) and a broad composition by Zenderoudi.
Rahim Asa was accompanied by Hassan Ghaemi, whom Grigorian introduced and described as a “wild” artist. Ghaemi’s art was not on display at the gallery - his work was either too “wild” for Esthétique, or it did not fit Grigorian’s conception of modern Iranian art (which was more likely). But Marcos was gracious and let us know we could see more of it at Ghemi’s studio, which, he added with a laugh “is also his bedroom!” I remember that during this exchange Hassan Ghaemi was standing there grinning ear-to-ear. He had a gold tooth right in the front of his mouth, a very distinctive look, to say the least. We were to forge a lifelong friendship with Hassan Ghaemi, but more on that later.
Marcos described the Zenderouti composition to us and explained that the artist had just finished his studies at the college of fine arts in Teheran, that he had earned a scholarship to the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris and had dashed off there. Sheila bought the piece, but if she wanted any others, Marcos told her, she would have to get in touch with Zenderoudi in Paris. This piqued her interest.
We turned our attention to Rahim Asa and Sheila struck up a conversation which I translated. His art was striking. It did not look in the least like the traditional Persian art we had seen everywhere. His themes were not religious, and his work was truly contemporary. Rahim was a philosopher of nature with a deep interest in science. You can imagine my surprise at hearing this. As a physicist I was immediately drawn to Rahim Asa’s discussion of wave theory, of how vibrations and atoms interact to make up the world around us. We debated the theory of relativity, the fourth dimension, and much more. It was fascinating to meet him, and to discuss this unique connection between art and science. He had just returned from Israel where he had a showing. Sheila bought the piece on display at Grigorian’s, and we invited Rahim to continue the conversation at our house over tea. His visits were to become a regular part of Sheila’s art salon. She composed the very first biography of Rahim Asa’s work based on our conversations and what she observed in his composition. I think it is very interesting:
“A poet and a philosopher who has written and published many treatises on the dualities inherent in the world of relativity, Rahim Asa’s compositions are at once simple childlike fantasies of delightful remembrances and vivid colors on the one hand, and on the other, arresting designs of atomic structures and interior logics. His worlds of microscopic landscapes and cosmic systems are continuous - one starts where the other leaves off. His “Anatomy of the Sunflower” and “Map of the Sun”, the worlds of the microcosm and the macrocosm, merge into one. “We have found the sun at the heart of the matter, the heart of the flower, when we detonate it. It is a mysterious sun, hot as hell and cold as terror.” With poetic insight Rahim Asa stares unflinchingly into this sun.”
0161 It was clear that Rahim Asa had two main directions in his work. In his color pieces he was like a Chagall - depicting a lot of decorative and highly stylized scenes of nature in which trees, for example, looked more like symbols than trees themselves. In his black and white compositions he was looking more towards the modern European artists of his time that were using all sorts of new abstract symbols. Unlike the other contemporary Iranian artists, Rahim Asa was secular and clearly looking to the future - not the past. The fact that Rahim Asa had these two sides to him was very interesting to us, and we started collecting him to see how the interconnection between these two styles would evolve. When you take a close look at Rahim Asa’s black and white compositions - his studies, as he called them, they depict universes within universes; the sun flares bursting into space, the white vibrations in the cosmos, the atoms moving excitedly around. It is his version of the universe expanding. In his color compositions we see the same themes, the sun within a flower, waves upon waves which make up nature and is not far from the truth of the matter. With Asa nothing is as simple as it appears. It is wave theory combining and recombining that he is depicting. If you look closely, what could pass for Christmas decorations are in fact atoms, and atoms are circulating across all the works. Asa is constantly aware of the duality of art and science, and he is a very scientifically oriented philosopher. He believed he could carry these themes over to the United States because this was a modern country where all this resonated. He told us he was planning to come to the United States when he could afford it.
When we moved back to Los Angeles in 1964 we received a series of letters from Asa. The first announced that he was already in New York City and that he was sending us some compositions and could we help him place them in a suitable gallery. The next letter was along the lines of “New York is terrible! It is too expensive - how can anyone live here?” We put him in touch with Hassan Ghaemi who in the meanwhile had also moved to New York, and they shared an apartment. We heard about their heated discussions in subsequent correspondence. Asa criticized Ghaemi for not thinking of Picasso as a great artist. Then they found their common ground and became the best of friends.
We put Rahim Asa in touch with one of our friends in New York and we asked them to commission a portrait. The job materialized, but cash remained tight and Asa continued to complain that New York was too expensive. The United States was in the grip of a biting recession, and we were feeling the pain like everyone. Sheila was supporting Ghaemi’s work in New York, and given how close the two artists had become she bought a lot of Asa’s works and sent the payment to his family in Teheran with whom he had an obligation. We know Asa’s ambition was to eventually get into cinematic art but he disappeared, we lost track of him. Perhaps his experience in New York was too much for him, or his ambitions were thwarted in some way.
Meeting (4888) these artists at Grigorian’s gallery made us realize that a modern persian art movement did indeed exist, and that it ran the gamut of secular art like Rahim Asa’s all the way to Zenderoudi’s heavily religious themes. It was also clear that we would have to make a very real effort to seek them out the artists, as the movement was disparate at best. In a sense, we would have to dig for them as we had excavated antiquities. Sheila bought the only Zenderoudi composition at Grigorian’s gallery that day, and she resolved to find out more about him although he had already left for France. Zenderoudi would go on to international fame as the principal Iranian artist of the Saqqakhaneh movement and renowned calligrapher, but at the time Sheila made this simple entry in her notes about this new emerging artist:
“Zenderoudi believes that myths and magic permeate the religious vocabulary of modern man, just as they did with his primitive ancestors. Zenderoudi tells us the talismans, the votives and the omens are the symbolic renderings of these psychic phenomena which are the foundation of the dogma and traditions of religion, pointing to the universality of the religious experience. His work, obsessed and original, translates this mythology as related to the Islamic faith and into a geometric architecture of calligraphy.”
Years later Sheila and I often spoke about how Zenderoudi’s depictions were really the common man’s version of Shi’ite religion. He worked with the religious symbols as they were practiced daily in the streets by the common folk who brought their prayers and entreaties to the local neighborhood shrines. In this sense Zenderoudi was more in tune with the masses and what was happening on the street, he was a forerunner of the Islamic revolution. In 1964 Sheila came across a paper by Firouz Bagherzadeh, one of Zenderoudi’s teachers at the academy in Teheran, that shed considerable light on the complexity of his character and inspiration:
“He must have been just a kid when I first met him. He was a student in my class at the academy of Fine Arts in Teheran. A student just like any other art student, no better, no worse, but what I remember to have remarked distinctively about him is that he always seemed sad, silent and thoughtful. I can even go as far as saying that he was, to a certain extent, bitter.
Today he is still very young, he is 26, but from his childhood and days of schooling he has very interesting memories. I always enjoy to cross question him and to listen to him when he is in the right mood for talking. His sincerity and frankness about his past make his memories very revealing in yielding clues and keys for his imagery, especially when one makes a close observation on the evolution of his work.
Unlike in the case of many a contemporary artist the element of “place” and tradition has had a very important part in the formation of Zenderoudi as a painter for his art is a rather abstract and purely symbolic rendering of a series of psychic experiences with the traditions into which he opened his eyes and his fresh mind as a child, like every other persian boy who is the inheritor of 1300 years of tradition related with Islamic faith, and who has in his original “self” a symbolic outlook towards life. Talismans, alchemy, and astrology are very great stimuli in the mode of thought amongst the people. Thus the element of history on one hand, and the life-story of the artist on the other, become important factors in the work of the critic, as well for the experience of the common man in the realm of Zenderoudi art.
Like every persian schoolboy Zenderoudi had to take Koran courses as early as the age of seven, but “he was a terribly cruel man, our koran teacher” says he. “I never found peace in his class”. Yet he was not only attracted but was really fascinated by the Islamic religious scene, not through the book, but through the concrete ceremonies of the religious anniversaries: the passion plays depicting the tragedy of Karbala where on the tenth day of the month of Moharram, 61 A.H. (10th of October A.D.) the prophet’s grandsons and their followers were surrounded and massacred by the armies of Kalif Yazig and where Imam Hussein the beloved son of Ali was decapitated. The majesty of this colossal tragedy predominated Zenderoudi’s mind at a very young age.
Among the objects that he saw in the museums and old persian homes he still remembers, with great admiration, are the religious arms and armour, and on the other hand one particular object that he saw in the Teheran Antropological Museum, namely the blood-stained uniform of the assassinated Kajar king Nasser ed Din Shah, a white blouse with sleeves and some inscriptions on the chest and a stain of blood.
This is a motive that is still seen today in many Zenderoudi paintings, but in reality the blood stained shirt of the assassinated king had served only to “ring the bell” for him, again, on the great event of Kerbela, to a myth that is so prominent a member of the religious vocabulary of Shi’ism.
Like every other Muslim child, Zenderoudi had witnessed, year after year, the anniversary ceremonies of the tragedy of Ahsra, the Taziya which include the street processions of the bare-footed mourners, all through the night, with torches and lanterns, while weeping loud and beating with chains on their own head and chests in order to express their grief and faith in the martyr. Even today one is able to see on the day of Ashura among the other ceremonies and celebrations the passion play representing the decapitation of Hossein and this is the most important part of the tragedy. The Zenderoudi was very deeply preoccupied with these religious myths, and his efforts to present their symbols and marks can be seen in his earliest works.
For years now he has been experimenting and exploring these domains, they have become, for him, a kind of obsession, and yet the result is always original. This owes, partly, to the rich and vast literature which is his source of inspiration.
His decapitated bodies are mummified in an architectonic weight and the architecture that he is preoccupied with is not Venetian but Islamic Persian. It is the mosque, not the Dome of the Rock but the Safavid monument that he is so fond of. A dome and two minarets, like a head and two arms, this is his main geometric vocabulary. He uses calligraphy not as a calligrapher, but as a miniaturist - he employs it as delicately as a spider web.” [extract from Firouz Bagherzadeh’s paper in 1964]
Because Zenderoudi had already left Teheran when Sheila set up her salon, our relationship was always “long distance”, with many letters and phone calls over the years about various subjects and of course we had many friends in common. I remember Zenderoudi calling us in 1965, after we had left Teheran, about a wonderful evening he had just spent with Nasser Ovissi in Paris. At that time Ovissi was a cultural attaché at the Iranian embassy in Rome. They reminisced about Sheila’s salon in Teheran, and Ovissi had given her a book of his works. Zenderoudi was favorably impressed and wanted to come to Los Angeles to discuss promoting his art in the United States.
A year later Tanavoli tells us that Zenderoudi stayed with him in Teheran for the 1966 Biennale set up by the Ministry of Fine Arts. He relates with hilarity how Zenderoudi had an altercation with the police and they shaved his unruly head of hair in a reverse mohawk to make him unpresentable for the Biennale. Tanavoli and other friends had to shave off all of Zenderoudi’s hair so that he could be fitted with a wig and participate in the Biennale. The story goes that when Queen Farah heard about this episode she had the chief of police fired and came to Tanavoli’s gallery to see Zenderoudi. But Zenderoudi had been so incensed that he had left immediately after the show and returned to Paris with that memory of Teheran.
In 1970 Zenderoudi called us to denounce the Borghese Gallery in Teheran. By this time Sheila and I had been in the United States for six years, but we had stayed in touch with everyone in Teheran. Tabrizi was our most regular correspondent, and we knew from him that the Borghese was focusing on Saqqakhaneh art and charging the artists high commissions which produced a lot of grumblings. Zenderoudi was furious at how they were characterizing his work and appropriating his ideas. He wanted us to know that the Borghese was full of the work of “want-to-be imitators”, that they were showing “old things” and that he had moved on artistically. We thought this was a significant development. We asked him what he was working on, and he told us he had shifted to calligraphy, and he was working on huge compositions the size of a room, and illustrating books of the Koran. When Sheila asked him what he was doing with his older works (we only had the one piece we bought during our first visit to Grigorian’s galley years earlier) he said she could buy them all, which of course she did. She sent checks to Zenderoudi in Paris and to his family in Iran. I remember Sheila later reflecting on the fact that Zenderoudi, with compositions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York as well as the Grey Collection at New York University, was always short of cash, and always experiencing hardship. Perhaps, she thought, this was the source of of his artistic genius.
The Islamic religion, like the periods of the Iconoclasts of Christianity, forbade the making of graven images. Therefore painting and sculpture became taboo, and the artistic expression found its way into the confines of book covers which made literature and book illustrations the accepted forms of expression. There, in the old documents recounting the heroic deeds from Persian legend and history, the art of the Miniature attained its supreme decorative style and expressive beauty. The old parchments, tattered and aged, are among the finest museum treasures of today.
Sadegh Tabrizi has successfully explored the decorative possibilities of the miniature in a modern orientation all his own. His works on old parchment have the luminescence and the ageless quality of the legends themselves. [0159-0160] Tabrizi was impressive because he combined techniques in an unusual manner. He takes some elements of the miniatures, which are usually book illustrations based on ancient mythology, and mixes them with traditional religious styles in a modern interpretation. He depicts scenes from Ali’s martyrdom, Shi’ite symbols, the black stone of Kaba, mythological horses that are also Ali’s black horse, and his penchant for using colors - creating this mixture of symbols that came to characterize his work. I believe he worked as a tanner where he learned to make small leather works which he sometimes incorporated into his murals.
Everyone artist was welcome at Sheila’s salons. Men and women, the young and the old, the unknown and the well established. They all knew it, and the word spread. We met Tabrizi though another artist who brought him one to one of Sheila’s events, which is how we met most of the emerging talent in those days. The conversation went something like this:
Mutual friend: Hello Madame Sheila, please meet Sadegh Tabrizi. He’s not really from Tabriz in Azerbajian, but he is a great new artist...
Sheila: ...that’s wonderful. Mr. Tabrizi, what are your interests? Would you like to be included in a showing the next time we have an event here?
Tabrizi: Yes! But I have them outside in the car. May I bring them in now?
and that was the beginning…
In our experience Tabrizi was the most prolific of the artists. He was like the sorcerer’s apprentice - he could not be turned off. He would sit down and compose and compose and compose. He did not mind where he sold his art, or for what price. His approach was “the more, the better”. When Sheila was asking him about his style - because she could see the influence of Persian miniatures - the extreme colorations, the horses, the figures of horsemen and so forth - she asked him where he was going with this. He replied that his inspiration came from events from the 7th century onwards, with everything that became the Shi’ite religion. “If you look into my compositions, both the colors and my black and whites, as well as my parchments, I am mythologizing Islamic sagas - nothing before Islam, not prehistoric times or legends. These are my conceptions of Islamic events. If it is a battle scene, it is a Karbala. If it is a black horse, it is the black horse of the prophet Ali. These are symbols, and I am creating myths.”
So he was the most prolific of all the artists we knew, and he was selling quite well in Iran. When we asked him for some compositions he produced fifty of them! And he would produce parchments that all had battle scenes - generals, citadels, armies, battles, martyrdoms, it was all there in every piece. And Tabrizi knew who they all were in Persian mythology and he would describe the stories in full detail.
Tabrizi was so active and well connected that through him we could follow the various goings on in Teheran art circles after our departure in 1964. The Borghese Gallery, for example, had sought to fill the void created by Sheila’s absence and we learned that they took a major portion of the artists’ earnings to cover their expenses. He told us that all the artists were “starving” despite having earned many prizes, and they were frustrated at not being able to make ends meet. Tabrizi related how Tanavoli sold one of his first sculptures to Queen Farah through the Borghese Gallery, which was owned by relatives of the royal family. That the Borghese was interested primarily in the “Saqqakhaneh” art that Zenderoudi had popularized. Zenderoudi called Tabrizi to express his frustration - much as he had with Sheila - “Dammit! They’re all imitators - I have nothing to do with it!” Tabrizi related how around this time Sohrab Sepheri, like Tanavoli, was going into ceramics and was very proud of this evolution. He reserved one of his best compositions for this medium and sold it to the Caspian Hotel - “Those cheapskates!” as he called them, according to Tabrizi.
There were frequent telephone calls with all the artists, but Tabrizi in particular, because Teheran’s exchange was being automated, and everyone was having phones installed in their homes and ateliers. Tabrizi always concluded our calls by telling Sheila, in an exaggerated British accent, ‘Madame, do not forget to apply that nitric cellulosic clear varnish to your nails - i think he was recommending this for the parchment compositions.. It will make them lustrous and supple and they will shine!” followed by a self-deprecating giggle at his own statement. Sheila loved it and we always laughed.
As I have said, Tabrizi was prolific. Sheila would question him about his themes and inspiration, and she suggested that his prices were too low. Tabrizi replied that, well, “I need a car, and if you could find a way to buy this lot I would much appreciate it.” Of course we obliged him - who could refuse? On another occasion he sent us Christmas cards beautifully illustrated with Islamic motifs with the suggestion that he produce them for sale ”I just thought you would have a show in December, and I can make cards for Christmas.” Sheila had to point out the contradiction of celebrating the most important day in the Christian religions with Islamic cards. He was great fun.
I should point out that contemporary, “pathfinder” artists did not have a venue in Teheran, before Sheila set up her salon. The tradition she established was for the artists to bring their work, often unframed and simply taped or tacked to the wall, and show it. People in New York and London would later coin the phrase “a happening” or “living art” to describe what in Teheran took place at our house, and everything was brought together by Sheila. There were entire wall covered in art. The foreign guests were agog about what they saw all around them, but the Iranians, amazingly, were somewhat oblivious to it - they would prefer to talk, gossip, eat and drink! Sheila would have to take them aside and explain it…
“General, have you seen this Tabrizi? It depicts a general like you”
“Really? Where, I don’t see him.”
“Right there,” she would say, pointing it out to him.
“Oh! I see it now. Maybe I should get that one. Do you recommend that I get that one?”
“Well, he’s a native of your country, a brother so to speak”, Sheila would reply. And then the general would summon his attaché with a flick his fingers and order him to “take that one down. It is mine.”
And that is the way it went. The artists loved it. There was nobody in Teheran that did anything on this scale for Iranian artists until Tanavoli borrowed Sheila’s salon format when he opened the Rashd Club19 a year after we left for the United States.
When we met Pilaram he was still a student at the Teheran Academy of Fine Arts. The other artists brought him over and introduced him as the “young kid on the block” - I think he was 24 - and we became involved immediately. Sheila asked him about religion, his concepts and theories, and where he was coming from. Unlike other artists who stood back and listened to what others had to say, Pilaram had something to say. He was bright, he was animated. Perhaps it was his youth, but what was surprising about him, apart form the maturity of his art, was the fact that was very well spoken, very eloquent. He knew his subject thoroughly.
Pilaram didn’t care to discuss the work of other artists, or even to spy them as they so often did among each other. He was was uniquely focused on his own art and what it represented. He had already exhibited at the Biennale (doesn’t everyone?) and didn’t miss a beat when he said it. He did not use the term “Saqqakhaneh” - that was a style developed by Zenderoudi - because those motifs came naturally to him. He was ver certain about the direction he wanted to take with his art and he produced much of it a fury of passion when he was very young.
He perhaps had a budding rivalry with Zenderoudi because they both had the same artistic sensitivities, and because even at that early age Pilaram was a master calligrapher. This was possibly a point of jealousy or friction between the two, and years later Zenderoudi would come to resent Tanavoli’s choice of Pilaram as the calligrapher for his Rashd gallery. I remember Sheila being impressed that Pilaram was going back to school to finish his studies. This was in sharp contrast to Zenderoudi who had practically fled Teheran when he got his scholarship in Paris.
Pilaram was completely aware and deliberate about how is calligraphy fit with the broader subjects of his art. He would start with the name of Ali which he would convolute it into a calligraphic masterpiece, and then merge into his representation of a headless Ali with his double-edged sword, the moon and all the other symbols he deployed. It was all interwoven, and very deliberately - unlike other artists who created from their subconscious and could not articulate their motivation as clearly as Pilaram.
[4951] Knowing Pilaram as Sheila I knew him, we felt his bigger compositions were coming from a deeper center of his soul, and that they expressed his true beliefs and devotion. Because of that, we felt he was putting everything he had into his work - not that the smaller pieces were any less meaningful - but these large ones were absolutely sacred to the artist. They are primarily devotional works, and are intended for mosques, or museums, or someplace devotional that a devoted follower can appreciate their meaning. Pilaram’s compositions, whether small or large, were conceptually based on Islam because that was his working material, his inspiration. But the compositions have nothing to do directly with the importance (supremacy) of Islam, they are first and foremost pieces of art. Neither Pilaram or any of the contemporary artists were religious fanatics, or dogmatic - they just used the common cultural themes and symbols they grew up with, just like Picasso used Spain for his Guernica, or the Europeans depicted the Madonna and the Child. Pilaram and his contemporaries made art, not religion.
[follow with The Pilaram/Tabrizi discussion at Azaris]