Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution

When asserting the history of 20th-century cultural forms, non-Western art can no longer remain relegated to the margins, viewed as derivative and imitative of canonical Western artistic modes. This assessment of modern Iranian visual culture from the 1960s and 1970s suggests that modernity in Iran was a creative, complex and contested process. The book examines the expression of Iranian modernity in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, photography, posters and graphic arts. It highlights new modes of artistic production within an expanding institutional context: developments in Iranian art criticism, exhibition apparatus, education and patronage. The contributors also address changes in the iconography of Iranian art and in the increasingly social role of the artist. Ultimately, these patterns of artistic production influenced the art that accompanied the Iranian Revolution of 1979. This work demonstrates that the visual arts serve as an important archival record of a critical period in Iranian history.