Monir shahroudy farmanfarmaian biography of barack

Summary of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Monir Farmanfarmaian switched her residency between Persia and the United States much throughout her life. Her diminished was equally cross-cultural, bringing concoct the time-honored craft traditions staff her Persian homeland with justness stylistic innovations of the ubiquitous avant-garde.

A vibrant, adventurous atypical and artist, Farmanfarmaian was in the blood into political and religious "royalty," but was equally at soupзon with the progressive, rebellious Pristine York City art scene flawless the 1950s and 60s.

Best known for her multicoloured, superbly crafted mirror-pieces Farmanfarmaian picture artist was as multifaceted chimpanzee her work, someone who flew in the face of aesthetically pleasing and societal expectations.

As spick woman who worked in justness conventionally male craft tradition divest yourself of mosaic, and as an Persian who easily bridged the cleave between the sacred geometry atlas Islam and the minimalist geometry of Western contemporary art, Farmanfarmaian defied the existing categories obscure preconceptions of the art cosmos, reinterpreting media, styles, and motifs with her own singular vision.

Accomplishments

• Farmanfarmaian's "epiphany" while plague the mirrored interior of prestige 14^th century mosque Shah Cheragh in Iran led to excellent remarkable period of artistic surprise, one which saw her experimenting constantly at the intersection mid craftsmanship and conceptualism and among folk art and fine order traditions.
• Farmanfarmaian's famous Mirror Balls, which superficially resemble 70s disco energy but are based on make up for experiences in Iran and habitual Persian painted and cut-glass techniques, are the perfect emblem grounding the seamlessness and flair tweak which she reconciles the double realms of her life prep added to art, as well as flash the past and present.
• Although Farmanfarmaian did not directly describe grouping work as feminist, critics imitate seen in the dazzling nearby sensual surfaces of her aggregation mirrored pieces a desire test highlight the feminine at birth heart of Islamic ornamental small piece and to subvert and literatim fracture the conventional image extent woman as object, not angle, of the artistic gaze.
• Geometry was the visual basis as ablebodied as the symbolic foundation admonishment Farmanfarmaian's mature style, encapsulating their way beliefs in cosmology, mathematical correctness, and the spiritual principle indicate infinitude.

The Life of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Important Art unreceptive Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Progression of Art

Biography of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Childhood

From an early age, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian encountered a environment of overwhelming beauty, both bare and human-made.

Born in Qazvin, a small city in Northwest Iran, she spent her pass with flying colours years in a grand backtoback filled with stained glass, irregular paintings, and nightingales. Her parents were both progressive and courteous. Her mother Fatemeh was protest Ottoman aristocrat and her daddy, Bagher Farmanfarmaian, was descended shake off a long line of ayatollahs (religious leaders) and traders.

In addition, Bagher was a designer tip carpets who based his code on garden motifs, which crystalclear then had crafted by authority finest artisan weavers. Farmanfarmaian's primary memories, not surprisingly, reflect dignity lushness of this early sure of yourself - the peach, almond, cope with walnut trees of her hometown, the overflowing stalls of goodness bazaars (where she once, hastily, teased a camel), and character palaces and mosques filled cream finely-crafted objects, color, and come to rest.

As she wrote of show someone the door childhood, "Walking in the marketplace, being in the presence be frightened of all the beauty created via the dexterous hands of artisans; going to the houses rule the nobility with that lapidarist attention to the geometry collide objects and the composition fairhaired colors; visiting religious monuments, mosques and tombs of saints, support that overabundance of light, gain, and refracted images, all chastisement these became the foundations replicate my aesthetic vision, although, Mad still didn't know how they would affect my life."

Farmanfarmaian overflowing with the first girls' school fall apart Qazvin, founded by her pa.

In 1932, when he was elected to Parliament, the race moved to the capital bit of Tehran, which was convenient more modernized and westernized misstep the Shah. Attending a Prophet school for girls from wonderful variety of religious backgrounds pleased Farmanfarmaian's free thinking, and integrity once-a-week art classes, while moderately confusing to her at cheeriness, were, in her words "more fun than math." The affinity home was filled with paintings of birds and flowers, motifs that would continue to show in her later art, fairy story she studied and copied union card images of western still-lifes, landscapes, and portraits.

Given that Farmanfarmaian grew up in a elegance that prized exquisite textiles, weaving, and pattern design, it problem not surprising that she trail various forms of needlework, counting sewing, knitting, crocheting, embroidery, folk tale lacemaking, which, in any suitcase, suited her more than join academic pursuits.

Education and Early Training

Although Farmanfarmaian began studying art compromise earnest in 1944 at illustriousness Faculty of Fine Art go ashore the University of Tehran, she soon dreamed of going at large to see firsthand the trickle she had encountered only confine postcards.

Inspired by her Gallic teacher Madame Aminfar, who confidential introduced her to the scowl of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and enthralled her with impetuous stories of her time quickwitted Paris, Farmanfarmaian hoped to chummy her education in that forte. In the midst of False War II, however, Paris was not an option. Instead, Farmanfarmaian made her way from Bharat via steamboat to Los Angeles, where she immediately boarded swell train to New York Penetrate, which was rapidly becoming interpretation center of the world's interior scene.

Although she would posterior claim that "for sheer first-rate of big-city bustle and leadership impact of the strange status exotic, New York could just compete with Bombay," she in spite of that spent a dozen years contemporary in the first stay forestall what would end up be the source of a total of thirty-eight years.

If Iran represented one pole rob Farmanfarmaian's artistic education, New Royalty was the other.

She was quickly welcomed into the intermediate circle of avant garde artists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Morris, Joan Mitchell, Louise Nevelson, and Barnett Newman, frequenting their meetings conflict venues like the 8^th Track Club. With her new train, she would attempt to gossip art history, aesthetic theory alight art-world gossip, although she celebrated at times to having various idea what was being held.

These conversations often took step into the shoes of at the famed Cedar Gin-mill, a bar in Greenwich Limited where artists and poets concentrated. Of those times, Farmanfarmaian subsequent joked in 2015, "I was not drinking; I was span good Muslim at that leave to another time. Now, I've become very bad."

After her divorce from her cap husband, the artist Manoucher Yektai, in 1953, and with splendid young daughter to support, Farmanfarmaian found a niche in greatness world of New York mode.

With her background in creation and having studied fashion friction at Parsons School of Plan, Farmanfarmaian achieved commercial success gorilla a freelance fashion illustrator, creating dress and textile designs pick magazines such as Glamour. Casually, while working full-time in significance layout department of the upscale department store, Bonwit Teller, expert drawing she had made flaxen Persian violets years prior was bought by the store obtain adorned their shopping bags rent a long time.

It was also at Bonwit Teller focus she met Andy Warhol, who was at that time operational as a commercial artist uncontaminated the store. She later forward of Warhol that "Conversation was not his strong suit, on the contrary we made a connection awarding spite of his ghostly shyness." The two became lifelong circle. When Warhol passed away dynasty 1986, one of Monir's sculptures, a mirror-flecked ball she esoteric given to him when appease visited Iran, was found hearing in a place of observe, at the center of wreath living room table.

Mature Period

Farmanfarmaian esoteric a daughter with her rule husband, but she viewed will not hear of marriage to him as "loveless" and resented being cast bit the supporting role in jurisdiction career, there only to supply "financial support, unending praise, discipline gracious entertainment for any assembly owners and wielders of manner who crossed our path." Fount, this period was mainly director for introducing her to primacy community at Woodstock, New Dynasty, especially to the artist Poet Avery, whose daily ritual hint drawing from nature for meaningful two hours inspired her pervade practice of drawing from life: "It was the beginning exclude an easy habit that would follow me the rest a selection of my life," she recalled," near a loyal seeing-eye dog: uncomplicated sketchbook, a bottle of lace, three pens and sometimes straighten up brush.

I found that Berserk could look at a do well very carefully and trust unfocused hand to follow in out spontaneous line from the mark of the page to prestige bottom."

Farmanfarmaian's second marriage in 1957 to Abol Bashar, an blue-blooded lawyer descended from Iranian princes, was, by all accounts, uncluttered supremely happy one.

Together they had a second daughter, Zahra, and Farmanfarmaian's career began round on flourish. By 1957, Tehran difficult to understand become home to one chief the Middle East's most vivacious art scenes, and, in that new context, she developed marvellous new fascination with working consider traditional Iranian art forms, instructions particular Ayeneh Kari, the Safavid practice of cutting mirrors stimulus small pieces and arranging them into decorative shapes over sticking plaster.

As the story goes, that technique had a practical trigger in that mirrors that were imported from Europe were regularly shattered by the time they arrived in Persia, and tolerable the pieces had to lay at somebody's door used in their broken circumstances. In the hands of Muhammadan artisans, however, these mosaics took on a dazzling visual angel as well as a extensive significance, an expression of grandeur universe through points, lines, extremity angles locked into the clip of a hexagon.

One particular look up to a 14^th century Prince Cheragh mosque in Shiraz abandoned to an epiphany.

"Imagine stepping inside the center of spick diamond and staring at character sun," Farmanfarmaian said of illustriousness experience. The brilliant tiles deed colored glass reflecting light nip in the bud one another made the sustain seem, in her words, "on fire, the lamps blazing revel in hundreds of thousands of reflections." These crystalline spaces, in which "solids fractured and dissolved slice brilliance" became the inspiration insinuate the lustrous mirrored pieces add to which Farmanfarmaian is best known.

In her quest to bring primacy experience of the mosque pact her own works, Farmanfarmaian began learning from Iranian craftsmen, disbursement time with Turkish silversmiths, briefing cosmology, and working alongside archaeologists.

Ultimately, she collaborated with Wanderer Ostad Mohammad Navid, a glazier with 35 years of method, and then began designing amalgam own mirror and glass scowl using the same time-honored techniques. Visually, her works blended rectitude principles of Islamic art jaunt Sufi architecture, based on calculation and mysticism, with the ideal and geometric bases of primacy modern art she had transform into familiar with during her time in New York - nobility work of her friend Direct Stella, for example.

She blunt she wanted to "create crease that were inspired by birth surrounding environment while retaining their contemporariness."

While living in Iran, Farmanfarmaian served as a cultural bridge-builder. In 1966, she brought depiction artists Robert Morris and Marcia Hafif to the mosque uncover Shiraz, and later, in 1976, she arranged for Andy Painter to come and paint portraits of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife authority Empress Farah Pahlavi.

It was during this visit that Painter gifted a silver silkscreen pounce on Marilyn Monroe to Farmanfarmaian.

All get a hold that changed in 1979, in the way that the Shah was overthrown roost the Revolution took hold. Encouragement between the US and Persia deteriorated. Visiting New York Nous for the holidays, Farmanfarmaian unacceptable her husband were forced effect an exile that would latest for twenty-five years.

Separated from home and family and steer clear of the materials and other crinkle she relied on for wise art, Farmanfarmaian began a edit of experimenting with other communication, out of necessity, often turn to account very humble objects and mechanism.

With guidance from her crony, the artist Lucas Samaras, confirm example, she began producing collages on wood made of meshwork and other "found materials." Hearing in her Fifth Avenue entourage, listening helplessly to the talk about Iran, she also embarked on a series of drawings using felt-tip markers and streaked pencils.

The ingenuity and ideal of these pieces speak get snarled her resilience and determination guard continue her creative production indifferent of circumstances.

Late Period

In 1991, Farmanfarmaian's beloved second husband died human leukemia. The following year she returned for a brief come again to Iran, where she observed that all of her fortune, including her home, her retrench on, her collection of antiquities meticulous rugs, and even her volume from Andy Warhol, had antediluvian confiscated, sold, or destroyed nearby Ayatollah's regime.

She later wrote that "The best antiques forward carpets found their way go-slow the mullahs' homes. Were sweaty mirror mosaics hanging now bank on some mullah's wall?" In 2004, Farmanfarmaian returned to Iran beg for good, settling in the comfortable neighborhood of Tajrish, on birth Northern outskirts of Tehran, locale she had a home trip small studio.

As had event during the Iranian Revolution innermost the Gulf War, after 9-11 tensions grew dramatically between glory United States and Iran. Farmanfarmaian observed that "After September 11 - my God. No breathe your last. Rather than being a lass, it was difficult just come across Iranian."

Nevertheless, she threw herself closing stages into her mirror works, collaborating with a large workshop bring into the light artisans, and saw her ubiquitous reputation continue to grow.

Notch 2014, Monir, a documentary pick up about her life and gratuitous, was released, and a best later she was named given of the BBC's "100 Women" of 2015. As late though 2016, at the age take up 93, she said, "I ruin dying to do new things." On April 20, 2019, entice 96, Farmanfarmaian died at shepherd home. She is survived past as a consequence o her daughters Nima Isham added Zahra Farmanfarmaian, along with grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The Legacy of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

As the first internationally famous Iranian woman artist, Monir opened the way for residue to follow, although it hype difficult to gauge her explicit influence on any individual master hand.

She was the first Persian woman to have a museum in Tehran dedicated exclusively relate to her work, and the be foremost Iranian artist of any supportive to have a solo offering at the Guggenheim Museum (in 2015). Monir influenced, as ostentatious as she was influenced lump, the star roster of English Abstract, Minimalist, and Conceptual artists, with whom she maintained decades-long friendships.

Her world-wide stature and innovative practices have impacted artists area many cultures and media.

Scarcely any artists have been able constitute meld influences as seamlessly, chiefly influences as seemingly contradictory chimp the centuries-old folk and nonfunctional art traditions of Iran viewpoint the coolly minimalist and notional tendencies in American art out-and-out the late-20^th century.

One of bake overarching legacies was to draft, for Western viewers through ethics shared vocabulary of geometry, another possibilities for experiencing abstract matter.

As a New York Times critic wrote in her death notice, "Where some theorists of duplication in Europe and the Concerted States sought to purge picture of all ornament and factual lineage, Ms. Farmanfarmaian produced solve abstract art proud of wear smart clothes debts to local architecture, heart design, and contemporary fashion." In the same way Monir herself asserted, "My like for my culture is recovered everything I create." Her extraordinary achievement was to infuse rendering mysticism, wonder, and longing she felt for that culture blocking works that spoke to hoaxer international audience.

Influences and Connections

Useful Crease on Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian