Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Biography

One day Monir Farmanfarmaian walked into the Shah Cheragh shrine in Shiraz. There is no exact date; sources say “around the 1970s”. The high domed hall was covered all over with tiny mirrors, square, triangular, hexagonal. In her memoir she later recalled that the whole space seemed to be ablaze, the lamps splintering into hundreds of thousands of reflections and solid forms melting into the glow, and that she was overcome. The visit became a turning point for all her work with mirror.

The technique she saw is called aina-kari: mirror is cut into small pieces and slivers and set in patterns on plaster. In Iran the craft was handed down from father to son. Farmanfarmaian worked with the master Haj Ostad Mohammad Navid: they cut mirrors and glass painted on the reverse into a multitude of shapes, and she then assembled these into constructions in which Sufi and Islamic motifs can be heard. She is called the first contemporary artist to have read this tradition afresh and joined it to the rhythm of Western geometric abstraction.

She was born on 13 January 1922 in Qazvin, into an educated family. As a child she took drawing lessons from a private tutor and learned about Western art from postcards. Then came the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran. She meant to continue her studies in Paris, but the Second World War got in the way, and in 1944 Monir set off for New York by steamer. There she studied at Cornell University, at Parsons School of Design, where she chose fashion illustration, and at the Art Students League. She worked on commissions, including for “Glamour” magazine, and then at the Bonwit Teller department store, where she met the young Andy Warhol. Through New York’s avant-garde Eighth Street Club she became friends with Louise Nevelson, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman and Joan Mitchell.

At the beginning of 1957 she returned to Tehran and married the lawyer Abolbashar Farmanfarmaian. At home she was captivated by tribal and folk art. She collected paintings on glass, nomad jewellery, ceramics and one of the largest collections in the country of “coffee-house paintings”, which folk painters made for the coffee houses where old tales were recited. In 1958 her work was shown in the Iranian pavilion at the Venice Biennale and won a gold medal. Exhibitions followed at the University of Tehran (1963) and the Iran-America Society (1973), and in 1977–1978 she carried out a commission for the Niavaran Cultural Center.

In 1979 the couple went to New York to visit relatives, and at that point the Islamic Revolution began.

Exile stretched out for more than twenty years. In America the mirror mosaics would not come right: there was no thin mirror and no experienced craftsmen. So she concentrated on commissions (in 1981, for example, for the Dag Hammarskjöld building in New York), textiles and drawing. Almost everything left behind in Iran, both her works and her collections of folk art, was confiscated, sold off or destroyed. Her husband died in 1991, and in the 1990s in New York she made “Heartaches”, a series of twenty-five small box assemblages of photographs, prints and objects linked to their former family life.

In 1992 Farmanfarmaian returned to Iran, and in 2004 she once again gathered a workshop in Tehran of old and new assistants. There followed commissions for the Victoria and Albert Museum (2006) and the Queensland Art Gallery (2009), the Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane and Venice again (both in 2009), and the São Paulo Biennial (2010). In 2011 the book “Cosmic Geometry” came out with an interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist; the tributes to her were written by, among others, Etel Adnan, Abbas Kiarostami, Shirin Neshat and Frank Stella. To my mind, this list of friends shows better than any definition which worlds she lived between.

Her first large museum retrospective, “Infinite Possibility: Mirror Works and Drawings”, curated by Suzanne Cotter, was shown in 2014–2015 at the Serralves Museum in Portugal, and in 2015 the exhibition moved to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The same year the BBC put Farmanfarmaian on its “100 Women” list. In December 2017 the Monir Museum opened in Tehran’s Negarestan Garden: fifty-one works given by the artist, under the management of the University of Tehran.

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian died at her home in Tehran on 20 April 2019, at the age of 96.