Untitled

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.

This counts as one of Mohassess’s more baldly political drawings, it depicts a blindfolded man with his hands tied behind his back. He is impaled by a large boot. He leans forward to lick the top of the shoe. This image recurs in Mohasess’s oeuvre: condemning an populace Iranian too cowardly to fight against the regime holding the country hostage. The drawing reflects the style he developed before moving to New York.