Tavalodi Digar (Another Birth)

Iranian-American artist Ardeshir Mohassess was a celebrated satirist of contemporary life and politics in Iran. Introduced to the Iranian intelligentsia at a young age by his mother, a poet and educator with a prominent literary salon in Isfahan and Tehran, Mohassess began publishing drawings in Towfiq, Iran’s leading satirical and literary journal in 1951, at the age of thirteen. His work reflected an ongoing fascination with media culture, photographs, newspaper clippings, Hollywood films, as well as Qajar-era lithographs and coffeehouse paintings. Mohassess also collaborated with many of Iran’s leading twentieth-century writers and intellectuals such as Ahmad Shamlu (1925–1999) and Sadeq Hedayat, and was well-known with Iranian artistic circles of the 1960s and 70s.

After moving to New York 1976, his style changed to focus increasingly on compositions influenced by the collapsed perspective and mid-ground composition of Persian miniature painting. At the same time, he rendered figures in a loose and vividly animated line. Scenes depicting literary, courtly and religious themes became common. In this work, a woman in a sleeveless shift dress and bobbed hair holds a bouquet of enormous roses. Above, a watering can rains water onto her head, while at her feet another head resembling that of the woman’s grows. The ink drawing was published originally in Ardešir o havā-ye ṭufāni (Ardeshir and Stormy Winds) (Tehran: Tus Publication, 1973). In his introduction to the book Ali-Aṣḡar Ḥāj Sayyed-Javādi noted that Ardeshir "senses a stormy wind and observes the creatures who tumble about in this wind: the one who flees and the one who stands; the one who lights a lamp for the victims of the storm, and the one who steals the light and leaves the rest to the darkness."