"This is the most modern and novel painting I have ever seen. He must have been inspired by Salvador Dali."

The work the director of the Arts and Crafts School in Paris was describing is entitled "The Copyist". It was displayed in an art exhibition in the Guimet Museum in Paris in 1956. When the name of the artist and the date of his work were translated for the director, he was fascinated and stood looking at the painting for a long time. What was especially amazing to him was the fact that the artist, Mahmud Khan Saba, had died long before Dali had become famous.

This true incident underlines the necessity of introducing the international art public to the works of Iran’s painters. We in the Western world should not mistake primary and secondary sources because of our ignorance of the objets d’art of this great civilization.

In fact, the art of painting in Iran goes back a long time. Because of the Islamic prohibition of human representation, Iranian painting developed mainly in a decorative, ornamental direction, where the harmony of colors gained great importance and writing itself became a work of art. In the Shia, branch of Islam, human representation was always present in Moslem book illustrations, but mainly in a impersonal, decorative way.

With the conquest of Iran by Turkish Seldschuks in the eleventh century, a glamorous art epoch flourished during which a miniature style of ceramic painting and decoration was created. In the twelfth century a miniature style of book illustration was developed and reached its first highpoint in the Mesopotamian school of the thirteenth century. After the Mongolian invasion (time of Il-chane, thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) Chinese influence was taken up, and under the Timurid (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) a true Persian style of miniature painting developed.

In the Safavid era (c. 1500-1723) the Iranians were introduced for the first time to European art through traders and diplomats, who had established the first political and commercial links to the Shiite Persians. The Shah, Esmail, admired the canvases the Europeans had sent to Iran along with other royal gifts. They were different from the two-dimensional Iranian miniature paintings, which expressed their artists inward-looking, idealizing bent. In the European canvases people and places had been rendered in natural proportions, in accordance with the rules of perspective and light and shade.

During the Qajar era (1796-1925) Iranian artists began depicting the real world and day-to-day life. It was in this period that the first Iranian students were sent to Rome to acquire the basic principles of the European painting style, with its naturalistic representation of objects and individuals. The result was a series of naturalistic landscapes and portraits of princes and courtiers, musicians and dancers. Thus emerged a delicate, lyrical style of painting combining both Eastern and Western influences.

Mirza Abol-Hasan Khan Ghaffari, called Sani’al-Molk, the illustrator of the famous book The Arabian Nights (Hezar-o yek shab) , was well versed in European painting techniques, because he had received artistic training in Rome. Yet his work reveals more the influences of miniature painting and Iran’s artistic heritage. His contemporary, Mahmud Khan Saba, on the other hand, who is called "the last and most important Iranian painter in the domain of national culture", was one of the best artists striking an artistic balance between the current European experiences and the profound heritage of Persian painting. His water-colors depict the royal palaces and rooftop views of Tehran and its people in the Qajar time. And in his painting "The Copyist" (1859) he creates with a minimum of forms a solid composition, which at the same time is imbued with the impression of two-dimensional space. His work, which could be called a kind of geometric stylization, proves the accuracy of the famous statement by American art historian Wylie Sypher:
"Real revolutionaries in art are not those who revolt and reject the past, but those who, in the course of their revolt, find a new technique."

In 1934 Tehran University was founded to serve as a center for the propagation of modern arts and sciences and as a link to world civilization. In founding the university, the Iranian government was expressing its desire to integrate Western civilization into Iran's historical traditions. About the same time, in 1940, Esmail Merat, the Iranian Minister of Education, who had spent some years in Paris, ordered the Frenchman André Godard to lay down the foundations of an art school modeled after the L' École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. This school became the Fine Arts Academy, the cradle of modern art and painting in Iran over the next half century.

During this period three artistic currents were moving forward simultaneously: the school of Kamal ol-Molk; miniature painting and indigenous arts; and religious and coffeehouse painting. The latter refers to paintings found on the walls of coffeehouses or religious sanctuaries or in the hands of traveling dervishes showing the epic glories of their ancestors. Technically speaking, these pictures are very simple. The color schemes and compositions derive from the domain of miniature painting and follow the figural conventions of Qajar art.

The first exhibitions of modern painting in Iran took place in 1945 and 1946 and were staged in cultural institutions attached to foreign embassies, since modern artists were not yet recognized as such by the Iranian government. In 1948 a number of university-educated painters-among them Jalil Ziapur, Javad Hamidi and Mahmud Javadipur-launched a modern-art movement called the Fighting Cock Society. The modernists had to fight on two fronts: against the influence of the miniaturist painters and followers of Kamal ol-Molk and against the prejudices of the general public, which had yet to be won over. Luckily, the social ambiance in the 1940s was relatively free. The artists who were active in the progressive atmosphere of the times created modern works by drawing upon foreign and imported techniques while at the same time preserving their national and cultural identity. They were not practitioners of creative subjectivity but adherents to a type of objectivity that puts special emphasis on the visual elements of tradition.

Today Iranian artists address the challenge of how best to combine their tradition-bound cultural identity with the achievements of Western art in a variety of innovative ways. Their achievements are especially impressive given their artistic seclusion, and the complex political, religious and economic situation in their homeland.