Saqqakhaneh represents in Iranian art historiography the first successful translation of global modernism into the Iranian context. Saqqakhaneh is considered the first movement that moved beyond the belated imitation of Western artistic styles and established a local modernism rooted in Iranian visual traditions. Chapter 3 examines artworks and various written sources associated with Saqqakhaneh. Saqqakhaneh was not a self-styled art movement nor did the artists share a common aesthetic program. The various designations of Saqqakhaneh as a school of modernism, an artistic group, or even an independent art movement reveal no uniform definition of the term. This leads to the conclusion that art historiographical processes were more influential on the evolution of Saqqakhaneh as a category than the artists’ actual collaboration. Recognizing this distinction gives an important insight into the complex and shifting politics that prepared the ground for the reception of artworks connected to Saqqakhaneh. As a celebration of the Pahlavi monarchy’s liberal sponsorship of art and culture, these works play a key role in the memorialization of prerevolutionary Iran.

This chapter analyzes Jalil Ziapour’s artistic works and the Fighting Rooster Association’s previous untranslated writings to examine Cubism in the Iranian context. Until recently, art historiography considered Ziapour’s works as belated imitations of European modernist art resulting from an artistic immaturity with regard to Western modernism. The Fighting Rooster Association (founded in 1948) and its artistic productions reveal that the first generation of modernist artists was already deeply invested in the creation of a specifically Iranian modernism. The artistic adaptation of French Cubism enabled Ziapour and the Fighting Rooster Association to elaborate a suitable visual vocabulary for the creation of an artistic subjectivity rooted in Iranian cultural heritage. In addition, it helped foster the Fighting Rooster’s political hopes and ambitions for Iran’s democratization and to proclaim an alternative national identity rooted in the country’s spiritual heritage to counter Iran’s adoption of modern Western rationality.

The Conclusion summarizes the main findings in the book. It also explains how the research process interrupted the researcher’s expectations and enabled a more complex discourse to emerge. The Conclusion provides an engagement with Iranian modernist art less through the concept of history and more through the concept of memorialization. This helps again identify the weak points of Iranian art historiography and its apparent transparency.

The introduction provides a comprehensive historiographic overview of art historical works that established the dominant canon of Iranian modernist art. This demonstrates how the common narrative in Iranian art historiography has been predominately modeled after Western modes of knowledge production based on linear narratives of stylistic development. Such a formalist canon, however, largely detaches Iranian modernist production from its sociopolitical context of origin, reduces the artworks to mere aesthetic experiments with Western modernity, and situates it in a historical vacuum. This raises the questions: what does it mean to write Iran’s modernist art history? What interests are behind the idea of formalist progress and the depoliticization of modernist art from Iran? This outline determines the book’s main arguments, namely that Iranian modernist art and criticism functioned as a discursive field to critically explore notions of modernity and modernization. Second, the depoliticization of Iranian modernist art follows a political agenda. Methodologically, the introduction establishes the theoretical framework rooted in global art history and postcolonial theory to deconstruct imperial concepts of modernity and thus decolonize Iranian art history.

Structurally, Chapter 2 has three parts, it discusses the evolution of the term gharbzadegi (westoxification), which denotes the most substantial critique of Iran’s modernization, cultural politics as means of soft power in Pahlavi Iran, and previously untranslated art criticisms of Jalal al-e Ahmad. This chapter delves deeper into the museum’s history and foundation under the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah. For a deeper insight into Pahlavi cultural policy, this section will analyze the architectural design of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, showing that the instrumentalization of art and architecture helped to communicate the new ideology established by the Pahlavis. To alter the perception of modernist art in Iran as a mere illustration of Pahlavi modernization, the last part of the chapter will introduce Jalal al-e Ahmad’s art criticism. As important source material, his texts reveal that modernism was less a kind of formalist experimentation with Western modernity and more a new artistic language that provided Iranian artists with new means of expression to address social and political themes of their time.

The first chapter examines contemporary exhibitions inside and outside Iran as historiographical sites of knowledge production about modernist Iranian art. This chapter focuses on two case studies, the exhibition Iran Modern (2013–2014) and the canceled exhibition project Tehran Modern, which was supposed to present artworks from Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s collection at the National Gallery in Berlin. In light of these exhibitions outside of Iran, this chapter also investigates the history, legacy, and exhibition activities of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art as the official institution for modern art in Iran. A comparative perspective shows how these exhibitions repeated and strengthened the historiographical paradigm that modernist Iranian art production symbolizes the country’s successful modernization and secularization during the Pahlavi rule. A close analysis demonstrates that the depoliticized reading of Iranian modernist art in the respective exhibition contexts serves different contemporary political interests.