Behjat Sadr

Estate of the artist, Paris; thence by descent

Tehran, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Pioneer of Iranian Modern Art; Behjat Sadr, 2004, p. 96, illustrated in the catalogue 

This work is in very good condition. Some minor craquelures across the surface of the paper, most importantly on the upper right area of the work, these are all inherent to the artist choice of medium and creative process. The work has been relined on canvas and in some areas along the edges floats slightly. The colour are fairly accurate with the overall tonality being softer and darker in the original work. Some areas of bright green on the right edge of the painting are not noticeable in the catalogue illustration.
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The Blackness and lines standing in glass
On glass one instant
One glass standing a moment
On water longer moments
The changes on glass – the changes on water
Moments and lines in transformation
Glass turned to copper
And water covered in dust
Glass and water on the stillness of paper 

Poem by Behjat Sadr and Forough Farrokhzad, 1960's, Tehran 

Painted in 1964. 

Behjat Sadr was born in Arak in 1924 and began studying painting in 1948 at Tehran University. She graduated in 1954 and won a major scholarship offered by the Faculty of Fine Arts to study in Italy. In 1956, in Naples she met Roberto Melli (1885-1958) upon the recommendation of Marcos Grigorian, and he went on to become her mentor as well as introducing her to the art world in Naples. Roberto’s introductions to gallery owners and influential critics led Sadr to being selected to represent Iran at the Venice Biennale that year. Her work was critically very well received, with numerous leading European critics praising her directly, including Italian critics Emilio Villa and Lionello Venturi, and French critics Michel Ragon, Michel Tapie and even Pierre Gueguen, an instrumental champion of French abstract painting of the 1950s.

After featuring in the Biennale she returned to the University of Tehran and continued to teach there for almost 20 years. Her signature style of working with a palette knife on canvas in the manner of Gerhard Richter continued to develop over the years, and she became increasingly confident in her ability to work with paintings that were both robustly geometrical and poetically impressionist. She never allowed her work to stagnate and her extended oeuvre is testament to this. Sadr continually searched for new and innovative techniques; mixing oil painting with photographs, figures with abstractions, working in a variety of media from canvas and oil to wood, metals and other materials. Through blurring the lines of the mediums she used and her knowledge of Persian writing and calligraphy,  Sadr created fluid, graphic works in which she was 'capturing moments' and using them as a means of couching emotion within gestural snapshots, moving, in her words from 'interior to exterior'. Her work from the 1960s and 1970s was shown in Between World and Image, Modern Iranian Visual Culture, organized by New York University in 2002, and Manifestations of Contemporary Art in Iran (2007), in which Sadr’s paintings were exhibited alongside works by 24 international artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran.

Sadr moved to Paris in 1979 following the Islamic Revolution and worked steadily throughout what became her second European period. She was consistently supported by galleries in her adopted France from the 1980s onward, and exhibited as recently as February 2009 at the Galerie Frédéric Lacroix in Paris.

Sadr’s, work is intermingled with the most radical movements of western modern art without, however, being fully aligned to them. The historic draw of Iran keeps her from completely immersing herself in European styles, whilst engaging with them fully. With a career spanning more than fifty years, she is one of only a handful of women artists to have received international accolades for their work. Her powerful, unusually constructed abstract paintings have been selected for the Venice Bienniale and for gallery and museum exhibitions in Brazil, Canada, France, Iran, Italy, and the U.S and were most recently part of the groundbreaking show Iran Unedited History; 1960-2014 at the Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris. 

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by Dr. Mitra Goberville