Toward a Persian Modernism

Every culture that meets modernism from the outside faces the same dilemma. Adopt the new language wholesale and you risk becoming a provincial copy of Paris or New York. Refuse it and you risk becoming a museum of yourself. Most of the interesting art of the twentieth century outside Western Europe and North America lives in the narrow space between those two failures. In Iran, one of the most inventive attempts to walk that line has a name borrowed from a street-corner shrine.

The shrine on the corner

A saqqakhaneh is a small public water station, often a niche or a little alcove set into a wall, where passers-by can drink. In Shia tradition these are associated with the memory of the martyrs of Karbala, who were denied water, and they are frequently decorated with votive objects: metal hands, locks, candles, prints, inscriptions, the dense visual vocabulary of popular devotion.

In the early 1960s the name was applied to a loose group of young Iranian artists whose work drew on exactly this vocabulary. The label is usually credited to the critic Karim Emami, and it stuck, although the artists never formed a tightly organised school. What they shared was a method rather than a style: they took the overlooked visual culture of the bazaar, the shrine and the talisman, and treated it as raw material for modern painting and sculpture.

Two names come up in almost every account. Charles Hossein Zenderoudi made paintings dense with script, numerals and talismanic forms, letters used less as text than as pattern and energy. Parviz Tanavoli made sculpture that drew on locks, grilles and the metalwork of shrines, and later became known for his Heech series, giant, playful sculptures of the Persian word heech, which means nothing. A word for nothing, rendered solid, with a body and a pose: it is hard to think of a neater image for a modernism that takes its own language seriously and lightly at the same time.

Not quotation, translation

What makes the Saqqakhaneh artists worth returning to is not that they used traditional motifs. Plenty of artists in many countries did that, often to decorative and nationalist ends. It is that they used them as a modernist would use found material: abstracted, enlarged, repeated, taken out of their original function and set to work in a new one. The calligraphy in Zenderoudi’s paintings is often unreadable on purpose. Tanavoli’s Heech is a pun that turns a letterform into a figure. The tradition is not quoted. It is translated, and translation always changes what it touches.

This is the distinction Persiahaus cares most about. There is a way of using Persian heritage that is essentially costume: the paisley, the arabesque, the miniature-style illustration pasted onto a product to signal authenticity. It sells, and it flattens. There is another way, harder and more rewarding, that asks what a form actually does, what problem it solves, what idea it carries, and then carries that idea into new materials.

Take khatam, the Persian craft of inlaying tiny triangular segments of wood, bone and metal into dense geometric patterns, most often built around star motifs. As decoration, it is a lovely surface. As an idea, it is something more radical: a demonstration that the smallest identical units, arranged with enough discipline, can produce an infinite and shimmering field. That is a modernist idea. The Bauhaus would have recognised it at once.

What Persiahaus wants to be

We are not a museum, a tourist board or a party line. We are a small editorial house with three ambitions, and all three come from this tradition of translation rather than quotation.

First, to write about Persian and Iranian culture with the seriousness it deserves and without the clichés it has been burdened with: no veils of mystery, no exotic Orient, no hushed tones. Our readers include people who grew up with this culture and people meeting it for the first time, and we think both deserve precision.

Second, to keep the poetry in circulation. Persian is one of the great poetic languages, and its classics are still alive in ordinary speech. We will publish the originals where we can do so accurately, alongside translations that tell you plainly who made them.

Third, to make things. Our Print Room sells original prints made by the house studio, built from Persian forms and drawn in the flat colour and strict geometry of twentieth-century modernism. Our print Khatam is a small statement of method: a tessellation of eight-pointed stars, every tile identical except one, a single turquoise piece set slightly out of order. Tradition is the grid. The broken tile is us.

The Saqqakhaneh artists did not resolve the dilemma of modernism from the outside. Nobody has. But they showed that the dilemma could be productive, that a culture’s overlooked objects might contain a whole modern language waiting to be read. That is the bet we are making, one essay, one poem and one print at a time.