Manoucher Yektai

A key figure in the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, Persian American artist Manoucher Yektai (1921–2019) produced an immense oeuvre in dialogue with both the European and American avant-gardes and the academic tradition in which he was trained in Tehran and Paris. Beginnings surveys Yektai's output between 1948 and 1969, contextualizing the artist's first decades as a painter through scholarly essays by art historians Hamed Yousefi and Tausif Noor, as well as an essay by the artist and writer Amy Sillman. Yousefi discusses Yektai's poetry and painting in the contexts of Iranian modernism and postwar American art; Noor considers the artist's idiosyncratic approach to portraiture; Sillman builds out a vision of the artist from a single slash of red in a 1957 painting. In addition to archival photographs and a plate section, an introduction by Negar Azimi and a narrative chronology further flesh out Yektai's legacy.

Iranian American artist and poet Manoucher Yektai (1921–2019) was a founding member of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism. His practice was shaped by his interactions with de Kooning, Pollock and Rothko as much as by Iranian modernism. This second monograph on the understudied midcentury artist spans works from what he called his Body of Landscape series, including brushy, vibrant depictions of Positano, Italy and views of 95th Street in Manhattan. As poet James Schuyler wrote of this series in 1959: “Nothing is literally described but all is there: openness, greenness, the pink and wrecked look of New York as it often shows itself nowadays, Berlin-on-Hudson, glamorous and condemned.” This volume features a plate section that highlights the lushness of Yektai’s signature impastos, as well as essays by Suzanne Hudson and Paul Galvez.

With decadent colors, loose brushstrokes and heavy-handed impasto, the paintings of the Iranian American artist Manoucher Yektai (1921–2019) fuse Eastern and Western traditions, synthesizing a unique blend of abstraction and figuration that owes as much to Franz Kline as it does to Cézanne and the poetry of Rumi.
Influenced by his early life in Iran and his visits to Paris, and by the New York School, Yektai is recognized as one of the few Abstract Expressionists who also continued working in the still-life genre. An accomplished poet, he approached the act of painting with the melodic sensibility of his own free-verse poems.
This fully illustrated monograph, featuring essays by Robert Slifkin, Fereshteh Daftari, Media Farzin and Biddle Duke, as well as a conversation between Hadi Fallahpisheh and Tahereh Fallahzadeh, charts the artist's output over the course of the late 1950s to the early 2000s, spotlighting his novel consideration of form, color and space.