Description: Manoucher Yektai (born 1922) oil on canvas
Dimensions: painting: 19 by 27inches. frame.; 24 by 32 inches.
Medium: oil on canvas, signed lower right, dated 69.
Provenance: Private Collection, New Jersey.
Condition: Great overall condition.

Biography from the Archives of askART
Biography photo for Manoucher Yektai
MANOUCHER YEKTAI's life has brought him through three cultures: Iran, France, the United States. This trajectory can be seen as a search for Modernism, and for a participation in Modernism, indeed, for a home in it. For a painter, the itinerary seems clear in its meaning: from Iran where, under Islamic strictures about imagery, free artistic expression was not available, first (with a brief pause in New York) to the ripe ambience of the School of Paris, then (more permanently) to the fledgling excitement of the emerging New York School. But Yektai's development, seen in a larger frame, has not been entirely simple and linear.

His trajectory through three cultures seems nomadic, and his identification with Modern New York seems an acceptance of hybridity in the post-Modernist sense; but at the same time, in a kind of artistic double life, he has been careful to maintain his rootedness directly in Persian culture. While he paints in a Modern Western style and is known as an embodiment of the idea of absolute freedom of expression as in Action Painting, still, with another part of his mind, or his heritage, he writes, in the Persian language, long poems which, while they share a sense of mysticism with Rumi, are modern free verse. These are published for an Iranian readership, partly in Iran and partly diaspora residents in the United States.

His version of cultural hybridity is not so much shaped by different layers as by different channels: a traditional Persian poet, a Modernist American painter. In 1945, a crucial turning point in western history, Yektai, age 22, graduated from the University of Teheran. At a time when the problems of modernization and westernization had scarcely yet dawned in his homeland, he put that issue behind him by deciding at once to move to France, in search of the Modernist freedom to seek oneself through expression that the School of Paris offered. But the war was not over and Yektai waited in New York for several months, where he began studying at Ozenfant's studio on 20th Street and at the Art Student League. This unforeseen stopover, it turned out, was crucial.

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