D O C U M E N T I N T R O D U C T I O N

INTRODUCTION TO
JALAL AL-E AHMAD’S
“TO MOHASSESS, FOR THE WALL”

mohammadreza mirzaei

“To Mohassess, For the Wall”1 is an essential document for understand
ing the adoption of modernism in Iranian art as well as the confronta
tion of Iranian artists and intellectuals with the West in the period after
the US/Britishorchestrated putsch against prime minister Mossadegh
在 1953. Written for Arash magazine, its author is Jalal Ale Ahmad,
one of the most infl uential and charismatic Iranian intellectuals of the
时间, author of novels and short stories, and translator of French litera
真实. Through the title of his article, Ale Ahmad communicates that
he is addressing himself to the Iranian painter Bahman Mohassess,
one of a cohort of young Iranian painters—including, apart from
Mohassess, Marcos Grigorian, Behjat Sadr, Mohsen VaziriMoghaddam,
Manouchehr Sheybani, and Mansoureh Hosseini—who left Iran in the
mid1950s to study in Italy, and who returned home from the late 1950s
to the early 1960s. 然而, his real addressees in this article are all
Iranian modern painters.2 The result is less a commentary on painting

Jalale Ale Ahmad, “Bih Mohassess va Bara¯yih Dı¯va¯r,” Majalih-yi A¯rash, 不. 9 (A¯ ba¯n 1343
[October/November 1964]): 86–91.
The title of the article is diffi cult to translate. It is a reference to the Persian expression
bi dar mı¯gam ta¯ dı¯va¯r bishnavih (“I tell it to the door so the wall can hear it”), suggesting that
by addressing himself to Mohassess, Ale Ahmad also, or even sometimes more especially,
speaks to the other painters. 然而, when it comes to his sociopolitical critique, Ale Ahmad
is specifi c: “Mohassess has not fallen into the ditch. I say these words to the door for the wall
to hear.” This time explicitly, the other painters are the door, and Mohassess is the wall.

118

https://doi.org/10.1162/artm_a_00296

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119

The first page of Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s article “To Mohassess, For the Wall”

(page no. 86 of the Arash Magazine, issue no. 9, 1964).

than a document that helps illustrate the difficult position of the
Iranian intellectual in a society undergoing serious change.

The return of the aforementioned cohort of painters to Iran caused

a shift in Iranian art: unlike the generation that had preceded them—
including Jalil Ziapour and Ahmadi Esfandiari—for whom modernism
had been an opportunity to take up a new artistic idiom that allowed
them to domesticate (“Iranize”) modern Western painting, the younger
group broke away from these efforts. While for Ziapour, Esfandiari, 和
their colleagues the preferred subject matter had been mosques and
local neighborhoods, for these “Italian” painters the medium of painting
itself replaced the Iranian setting. For example, the work of Behjat Sadr
as well as Mohsen Vaziri Moghadam’s Sand Paintings are based on the
artists’ own gestures and chosen material, to the point of total
abstraction, belaboring the limitations of the medium in a way
reminiscent of European Art Informel.

In “To Mohassess, For the Wall,” Ale Ahmad demonstrates a criti

cal attitude toward those among Iranian artists who subscribe to an
imported modernism. He is especially concerned about what he terms
the “stutter” in the work of these artists, by which he presumably means
the absence of Iranian subjects and local narratives. With a certain
sense of humor, Ale Ahmad writes that such painters are painting
doors and walls, by which he means that for him there is not any
“movement,” “tremor,” “provocation,” or “ascent” in these works.

Three years before writing the present article, Ale Ahmad had pub

lished one of the most influential texts about the political and cultural
discourse prevalent in Iran during the 1960s. That work was entitled
Gharb’zadigı¯, an idiomatic title that has been rendered in English as
Weststruckness.3 Highly provocative and controversial, the treatise was
banned immediately after its publication, and its political and cultural
legacy has been hotly debated until today.4 While Weststruckness does not
closely follow one particular ideological or philosophical model,5 it does

Gharb’zadigı¯ has been inconsistently translated in English as “weststruckness,” “west
oxification,” and “occidentosis.” See the following translations: Ale Ahmad, Plagued by the
西方, 反式. Paul Sprachman (Delmar, 纽约: Caravan Books, 1981); Ale Ahmad, Occidentosis:
A Plague from the West, 反式. 右. 坎贝尔 (伯克利, CA: Mizan Press, 1983); Ale Ahmad,
Weststruckness, 反式. John Green and Ahmad Alizadeh (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1997).
Afshin MatinAsgari provides an overview of these debates in “The MidCentury Moment
of Socialist Hegemony,” in Both Eastern and Western: An Intellectual History of Iranian
现代性 (剑桥: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 144–89.
MatinAsgari, Both Eastern and Western, 175.

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include criticisms inspired by Marxism: in Ale Ahmad’s point of view,
Iranians were becoming mere consumers of Western products, 从
“iron ore” and “petroleum” to “music” and “mythology.” According to
the author, this leads to cultural alienation and, of course, 经济的
dependence. Ale Ahmad’s Marxist focus helps his readers understand
the implications of this dependence on consumption.6

In “To Mohassess, For the Wall,” Ale Ahmad shifts his analysis to

绘画, arguing that Iranian painters during the 1960s—including
the cohort of Italian returnees—have merely repeated Western cultural
processes and strategies instead of constructing Iranian ones.7

To make sense of their own work, according to Ale Ahmad, painters
“still depend on the word,” by which he means that they need critics to write
about their work by interpreting and analyzing it. Although he believes that
in this way even the abstraction practiced by Iranian painters can become
meaningful, the problem is that the referents for their work are unfailingly
located in the West:8 “Where, give weight to this brush in the hands of these
esteemed gentlemen? Could it be anywhere but the West?” That is why, 为了
Ale Ahmad, these modernist works do not “revive a memory”; they are
devoid of any relation to Iranian “states of mind,” and as such, they are little
more than what Ale Ahmad calls a “stutter.”

What does Ale Ahmad mean by this? Although some art historians

have suggested that his invitation to Iranian painters to “return to their
roots” can be reconciled with the tendency referred to in Iranian art his
tory as Saqqa¯’kha¯nih, in fact he explicitly criticized this school, seeing in it
little more than an orientalizing shortcut for untalented artists and a
bogus way of using modernism to portray a premodern society.9 Indeed,

To read a Marxist reading of Weststruckness, see Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride,
“Westoxification/Detoxification: AntiImperialist Political Thought in Iran,” in Political
Theories of Decolonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of the Foundation (牛津: 牛津
University Press, 2011), 35–54.
For Ale Ahmad, this repetition, rather than being a case of simple imitation, is not without
its politicocultural complexities: “Are you expected to remain a consumer of the West?,” he
asks. Being a “consumer” interestingly relates the fetishism for Western artistic processes
to commodity fetishism.
Bavand Behpoor has noted this in “Bih Mohassess va Bara¯yih Dı¯va¯r,” Text and Image,
accessed March 16, 2019, http://reviews.behpoor.com/?page_id=6258.
The term Saqqa¯’kha¯nih or Saqqakhaneh, in fact, “refers to the numerous public water reser
voirs constructed in memory of the seventhcentury Shi’ite martyrs who were denied water
in Karbala.” Fereshteh Daftari, “Redefining Modernism: Pluralist Art before the 1979
革命,” in Iran Modern, 编辑. Fereshteh Daftari and Layla Diba (New Haven, CT: 耶鲁大学
University Press, 2013), 30. The works grouped under this label were fairly depoliticized
and included a variety of approaches to religious, historical, or pop motifs that could repre
sent an imagined past of Iran through a modernist visual language.

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121

three years after writing the present article, in a review devoted to the
fifth edition of the Tehran Biennial, Ale Ahmad wrote that “foreign idiots
have thought that any handwriting/script that is not Latin is some sort of
a talisman, an exotic, primitive reminder of Africa, 印度, colonialism,
and sexual instinct, etc.”10

For Ale Ahmad, the problem with the modernists’ weststruck
“stuttering”—ultimately, a form of disintegration—was that it opened
the possibility that their work might be coopted by the state, since the
void it left behind could all too easily be filled with any number of
解释: “The circumstances conditioning our times and the
state apparatus will use your mute language and your eyecatching col
ors, devoid of substance, to render a device that fools the herd. 和
this is how history will judge you.” The context for Ale Ahmad’s argu
ment here is the Pahlavi regime’s radical program of rapid moderniza
的, which in the area of the arts was systematically expanded,
beginning with the establishment of the Tehran Biennial in 1958.
In the catalog for the Biennial’s first edition, its director, Marcos
Grigorian, optimistically (or naively) referred to the modernist project
of the visual arts in Iran: “Now, we want to place the star of Iran’s
name in the global sky of the Venice International Biennale so it can
shine where it deserves to be, and collect a large number of honors at
this grand art exhibition.”11 Grigorian goes on to expand on the politi
cal implications of this development: “We owe the preparation of the
Tehran Biennial and the effective participation in the Venice Biennale
to the General Administration of Fine Arts, WHO, following the noble
intentions of the Shah, have taken large strides to promote Iranian
national art.”12 The “noble intentions” of the Shah in promoting
Iranian art nicely illustrate the politicocultural impact of the West
feared by Ale Ahmad.

A few words should be said about Ale Ahmad’s style in the trans

lated article, which is difficult by any measure, and hard to translate.
Influenced by the French writer Louis Ferdinand Céline, Ale Ahmad
often writes in staccato style, his sentences at times short and frag
mented, and at other times maddeningly complex and labyrinthine.

10 Ale Ahmad, Ka¯rna¯mah’yi Sih Sa¯lih (Tehran: Ravagh, 1974), 153. All translations are by the

作者, unless otherwise noted.
Le Biennale de Teheran (Introduction to the First Tehran Biennial) (Tehran: Abyaz Palace,
April–May 1958), exhibition catalog, 4.
同上.

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His prose was so powerful indeed that the critic Reza Baraheni argued
that “Ale Ahmad, one of the main opponents of formalism in Iran, 是
one of the greatest formalists of the Persian language.”13 The paradox
implied here—that Ale Ahmad criticized the West in a style borrowed
from Western writers—epitomizes the paradoxical situation of the
Iranian intellectual after the 1953 coup, when antiimperialist and anti
Western sentiments gained much traction in Iran. Keen to resist
Westernization, intellectuals deployed their arguments under the direct
tutelage of Western thinkers, and Ale Ahmad’s article is no exception:
while he criticizes Iranian painters for remaining “consumers of the
西方,” the only writer Ale Ahmad cites in support of his arguments
is JeanPaul Sartre.

What gives the painter Bahman Mohassess such an important role
in Ale Ahmad’s eyes? On the one hand, they are friends and collabora
tors.14 As Ale Ahmad states in the text, he had been instrumental in
organizing Mohassess’s first solo show at the Nı¯ru¯-yi Sivvum (第三
力量) club, before Mohassess left Iran for Italy. Besides, he and
Mohassess, who was also a translator of Italian and French literature
into Persian, had many literary affinities.15 Apart from this, it was
Mohassess’s legendary outspokenness, the fact that he was never afraid
to speak his mind, that endeared the painter to Ale Ahmad. As Ale
Ahmad writes, Mohassess “does not manufacture an aura for himself
behind a veil of silence.” More important still is the fact that Ale
Ahmad considered Mohassess to be one of the few Iranian painters of
the 1960s who had not been coopted by the regime, “not fallen into
the ditch.” Indeed, Mohassess himself, whose figurative style does not
follow any Iranian visual tradition, went so far as to reject being part of
“Iranian art” altogether, stating that working at an easel was “not an
Iranian tradition.”16 And while Ale Ahmad is critical of Mohassess’s

13 Hasan Zerehi, “Guftigu¯’yi Hasan Zirihı¯ va Duktur Riza¯ Bara¯hinı¯,” A¯va¯’yi Ta¯b’yı¯d, 访问过

九月 25, 2019, http://avaetabid.com/?p=330.
Ale Ahmad mentions some of their collaborations in the text, such as Mohassess’s illustra
tions for Ale Ahmad’s novella Nu¯n wa al-Qalam (By the Pen), 反式. 中号. Ghanoonparvar
(1961; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988).
For example, Mohassess translated Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin into Persian and changed
its title to Tars-i Ja¯n (The Fear of Life). Mohassess mentions in his introduction that the new
title was chosen by Ale Ahmad.
In an interview with Mohassess that was published in the same issue of Arash in which Ale
Ahmad’s article appeared, the painter expressed ideas that seem close to Ale Ahmad’s: “在
伊朗 . . . the dead end of abstraction lies in the fact that any [artist] who does not know other
方法. . . can do abstraction. This is a problem.”

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Cover of Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s novel By the Pen (Tehran: 1940). Illustration by Bahman Mohassess. Courtesy of the author.

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work in any number of ways—referring to one of his most iconic paint
英格斯, Fifi Howls from Happiness (1964), by saying that Fifi sings a song
that is “as meaningless as the song any Madame Fifi would sing,” he
does see in Mohassess “a route to escape contemporary painting’s stut
ter”—the very stutter he identified in the work of the other “Italian”
modernists. In a striking paradox, 然后, Ale Ahmad credits a painter
whose practice was, by his own estimate, fully “nonIranian” with the
potential power to form a local “Iranian” discourse.

At the end of his article, Ale Ahmad issues an invitation to con
struct, 思考, and theorize “Iranian thought” and to create art rooted
in Iranian culture for a (yettobecreated) Iranian market and audi
恩斯: “Offer something, contribute to the goods that line this worldly
市场. Do not assume that the only buyers are tourists who, in fail
ing to show, can make the market rot.” Crucially, his intention here
is not to call for art’s commercialization; 的确, he criticizes those
modernists who sell their work to foreign “tourists” or to the Iranian
royal family: “alas, what a pity that you merely seek a buyer for your
wares.” What he means to say is, 相当, that if these painters have
their eyes on the market, then the best thing they could do would be
to create a market of their own. Ale Ahmad’s tone becomes emo
tional when he warns Iranian painters that “the razzledazzle of the
West occludes their vision” and asks them not to “allow their audience
to look like a fool” by their proWestern attitudes. Confessing that he
doesn’t have an education as a painter, Ale Ahmad makes it clear that
his interest is not in creating a commercial art market as an end in
itself—rather, he wants artists to create a community, an Iranian art
世界: “You do not wish to see the world from my eyes because you
hold a grudge. But I wish to see the world from your eyes in addition
to my own.” Here it becomes evident that the writer does not see
himself in the role of a teacher who issues prescriptive lessons to the
painters—he emphasizes this by asking them not “to place [他们的]
brush, in homage, at the feet of local colors and tradition”—but rather
more as a father figure. According to him, both intellectuals and
painters need to see the world through each others’ eyes to be able
to create something truly Iranian. That is how he believes they will
together create a local environment—a market—that could support
them both financially and intellectually.

“To Mohassess, For the Wall” offers a crucial window into the
adoption of Westernstyle modernism by Iranian painters during the

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125

1960s, and into how an “insider” intellectual such as Ale Ahmad evalu
ated the modernization of Iranian art before the background of what he
perceived as the critical neglect of Iranian traditions. With his highly
perceptive grasp of Cold War imperatives, Ale Ahmad understood
like few others the important role modernized art played for both the
Pahlavi regime and its Western allies. In this sense, his article also
offers a rare glimpse of the gulf that separated the domestic from the
foreign view of modern art in Iran.