The Cultural Politics of Art in Iran
Modernism, Exhibitions, and Art Production

Offers a comprehensive study of Iranian modernist art since the 1950s, showing its role in shaping ideas around national identity and anti-colonialism.

Katrin Nahidi (Author)

9781009361378, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 5 June 2025

301 pages
22.7 x 15.1 x 1.6 cm, 0.45 kg

Modernist Iranian art represents a highly diverse field of cultural production deeply involved in discussing questions of modernity and modernization as practiced in Iran. This book investigates how artistic production and art criticism reflected upon the discourse about gharbzadegi (westoxification), the most substantial critique of Iran's adaptation of Western modernity, and ultimately proved to be a laboratory for the negotiation of an anti-colonial concept of an Iranian artistic modernity, which artists and critics envisioned as a significant other to Western colonial modernity. In this book, Katrin Nahidi revisits Iranian modernist art, aiming to explore a political and contextualized interpretation of modernism. Based on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, Nahidi provides a history of modernist art production since the 1950s and reveals the complex political agency underlying art historiographical processes. Offering a key contribution to postcolonial art history, Nahidi shows how Iranian artistic modernity was used to flesh out anti-colonial concepts and ideas around Iranian national identity.

Introduction
1. Exhibitions of modern Iranian art – the construction of a secular heritage
2. Cultural politics in Pahlavi Iran – Tmoca's architecture and the evolution of Gharbzadegi in arts and politics
3. 'Saqqakhaneh revisited' – the art of historiographical construction of a local modernism
4. Jalil Ziapour and the Fighting Rooster Association (Korus-e Jangi)
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Constitution: government & the state [JPHC]