During the review session of Touka Maleki’s book “Modernist Art of Iran”, Ebrahim Haghighi stated that the present book could be applied as textbook for schools as modernist arts of Iran are missing in the present school books of arts.

IBNA: the review session of Touka Maleki’s book “Modernist Art of Iran” was held on Monday evening (May 28) at Farhangsaraye Arasbaran with the presence of Ebrahim Haghighi, Mohammad-Ali Baniasadi, Mahdi Hajvani, Mahmoudreza Bahmanpour and author Touka Maleki. 

At the beginning of the session Haghighi said: “Unfortunately most of the publications on Iranian arts are written by orientalists. After the Constitutional Revolution in Iran, society underwent transformation and researchers experienced many changes.” 

He added: “Establishment of art schools and faculties altered the traditional master-pupil relation and made art studies methodological.” 

“Art critics often grow out of literature. In this field one can mention Jalal Ale Ahmad, Ahmad Shamlou, Javad Mojabi, etc. And visual arts criticism is also done by poets and writers; it means that we have not raised any specialized critics in this field to specifically pursue the art criticism trend in Iran.” 

He went on to explain that in the past art criticism was common only in the field of cinema, but as we move further in time, the youth show more interest in artistic perception, research and criticism of contemporary art and since the universities has nothing new to offer to them they have to attend artistic cycles and read various sources in order to reinforce their understanding of art.” 

Finally emphasizing on the necessity to familiarize children with art at school ages, he hoped that the present book could be taught as textbook because school books of art are weak and there is no reference to modernist arts of Iran in them. 

The next speaker, Hajvani, appreciated the book and its publisher –Nazar – for having dealt with Iran’s modernist art and added: “Research on contemporary arts is a hard job. The book offers clues to the reader. Readign the book for me was like an exploration. It is fluent and written in simple prose and narrated from second point of view as if it spoke to an imaginary audience.” 

Hajvani criticized the lack of any philosophical or theoretic outlook in the book. “In the book modernist art is defined along with traditional art whereas we should first know classical arts and then approach the modernist art. Also in my opinion, different forms of art such as illustration, painting, miniature and graphics should have been separated in the book.” 

Then Mohammad-Ali Baniasadi mentioned some other defects of the research, like lack of any definitions of the terms cubism or expressionism and lack of an appropriate methodology.
After him, Bahmani referred to the problems of criticizing works of living contemporary artists and said in spite of the criticisms, there was no reaction to the book and this shows that the researcher has been just in his assessments. 

Touka Maleki’s “Modernist Art of Iran” is published by Nazar Publications.

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