Abstract
In 1948 the Iranian painter Jalil Ziapour (1920–1999), together with his artistic colleagues, the writer Gholam Hossein Gharib (1923–2003), playwright Hassan Shirvani (birth/death date unknown), and composer Morteza Hannaneh (1922–1989), founded the Fighting Rooster Association (Anjoman-e Ḵorūs-e Jangī) to promote the new emerging modernist arts in Iran. Jalil Ziapour and the Fighting Rooster Association were the leading representatives of cubism in Iran, which arose as a movement in the 1940s and offered Iranian artists like Ziapour a suitable vocabulary to elaborate an artistic subjectivity based on Iranian heritage. At the same time, it also helped to promote the Fighting Rooster Association’s aims to foster democratic hopes for the Iranian nation. This article focuses on Ziapour’s works and texts in light of Orphic cubist theory and highlights the beginnings of modernist art in Iran, the global entanglements of modernism, and the search for an Iranian art beyond orientalist painting traditions and exotic depictions of being the “other.”
Highlights
In 1948 the Iranian painter Jalil Ziapour (1920–1999), together with his artistic colleagues, the writer Gholam Hossein Gharib (1923–2003), playwright Hassan Shirvani, and composer Morteza Hannaneh (1922–1989), founded the Fighting Rooster Association (Anjoman-e Ḵorūs-e Jangī) to promote the new emerging modernist arts in Iran
Ziapour’s artistic practice illustrates how experiences of migration and transcultural processes of translation shaped the development of modernist arts in Iran
The strong connection between political commitment and artistic expression played a crucial role for the activities of the Fighting Rooster Association, and a closer examination of their writings demonstrates that their aesthetic principles were informed by Bergson, translated in the Iranian context through tropes of Sufism
Summary
In 1948 the Iranian painter Jalil Ziapour (1920–1999), together with his artistic colleagues, the writer Gholam Hossein Gharib (1923–2003), playwright Hassan Shirvani (birth/death date unknown), and composer Morteza Hannaneh (1922–1989), founded the Fighting Rooster Association (Anjoman-e Ḵorūs-e Jangī) to promote the new emerging modernist arts in Iran. Cubism provided Ziapour, according to Daftari, with a suitable vocabulary to establish an Iranian modernist art in the service of nationalization.[17] The art critic Bavand Behpoor affirms that the adaptation of cubist style was a way to connect to the artistic legacy of Picasso, who served as role model for many Middle Eastern artists, and made working in a cubist style a mere signifier of avantgardism.[18] Mortezza Godarzi goes one step further and harshly criticizes Ziapour’s attempt to link cubist elements with Iranian ones as a massive failure, and accuses the painter of harming the reputation of French cubism in Iran.[19] Iranian art historiography occasionally interprets cubism in Iran as a belated copy of Picasso’s artistic practice This phenomenon applies to the Iranian context, but is a wider phenomenon in the study of non-Western art history, which the art historian Partha Mitter described as the socalled “Picasso manqué syndrome.”[20] The Picasso manqué syndrome stems from Western art history’s epistemology of creating a history of artistic influence, which includes the study of artistic production outside the West. This history tends to present Western artists and their practice of cultural appropriation as superior, whereas the practice of “borrowing by artists from the peripheries becomes a badge of inferiority.”[21]
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