History, Identity, Memory: Nikzad Nodjoumi’s Arzhang

AbstractOne of the strategies available to scholars challenging the Western art-historical canon is the use of case studies of the careers of pioneering artists from the “periphery”. This essay will tell the story of a long forgotten chapter of the history of Iranian modern art which has only recently come to light. Just before the 1979 revolution, one of Iran’s young avant-garde painters, Nikzad Nodjoumi (b. 1941), was invited to provide a set of illustrations for a publication and translation of the Manichean text of theArzhangby the Niavaran Cultural Center in Tehran. Nodjoumi chose to focus on the theme of the prophet and painter Mani (AD 216–274) and produced a series of 280 visually and politically compelling small-scale paintings on paper. The paintings utilized a variety of strategies to construct a distinctly Iranian form of Modernism. In this series, the artist sought to synthesize Manichean themes and forms and traditional Persian manuscript elements with the abstract forms and gestural techniques of Abstract Expressionism. His principal formal inspiration was a group of folios of Manichean illustrated manuscripts datable to the eighth–ninth centuries AD located in the Museum of Asian Art in Berlin. This essay will begin by investigating the historical and cultural context of the commission; discuss the importance of the legend of Mani in Iranian culture and manuscript illustration, as well as the relationship of image and text in traditional manuscript illustration; and compare these paintings with their Manichean models. By exploring the works of one individual painter, the essay will show how Iranian artists of the post-World War II era were inventing a modernism that was both local and global. Through a close reading of this artist’s creative process, themes central to Modernism such as history, identity, and memory will be illuminated.</jats:p