Pictorial Shifts and Problematics of Defining Iranian Modernist Art (from the Qajar Period to the Pahlavi Era)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Iran witnesssed dramatic shifts in dominant political and cultural discourses due to omnipresence of the exhibitionary order and hegemony of Orientalism. Subsequently, traditions of image production were strongly influenced by these changes. This thread culminated in a shift in royal portrait painting, as well as other genres of imagery. I begin this essay by examining different paintings by prominent court artists of the Qajar dynasty (1786-1925), such as Kamal-al-Molk (ca. 1859–1940) and Mahmoud Khan Malek-al-Shoara (1813-1893), and through comparisons based on a material culture approach, I will raise questions on the organization of symbols and signs in these paintings. In the second part of the presentation, I will analyse these works through iconoligy and semiotic methods. The third level of each analysis underlines an epistemological shift, which influenced the symbolic order of royal imagery through the Qajar dynasty to the Pahlavi era (1925-1979). My arguments are mainly based on the way Kamal-al-Molk has framed royal signs in his painting, Talar-e Ayeneh (Mirror Hall) (1890-95). I will also argue that this particular painting demonstrates that epistemological shift mentioned above. The impact of Orientalism and the new order of representaion influenced by it are inevitable factors in the formation of a new dominant cultural discourse which reduces visual artistic practices to an exhibitionary situation. Drawing on some post-colonial texts, I will argue that this new order of representation that emerged and developed during the course of the nineteenth century Europe proceeded boundaries of Europe and became influential in reframing “Persian Art” as authentic, original, decorative and old but not modern at all. Based on such notions, Arthur Upham Pope tried to formulate the essence of “Persian Art” by means of a formalist theory. Furthermore, I will show how this led to revitalization of miniature painting from 1930s onward, and also how such formulations of Iranian artistic heritage formed an exclusively new modern pictorial language after 1945.