Jalal Al-e Ahmad's 1964 critique of Iranian painting's Western mimicry

In 1964, Iranian intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad penned "To Mohassess, For the Wall," a pointed critique of Iranian painters for merely replicating Western cultural processes instead of forging indigenous ones. This article followed his earlier work, Weststruckness, which examined Iran's cultural alienation from the West. Al-e Ahmad directed his text to painter Bahman Mohassess, whom he viewed as one of the few artists not co-opted by the Shah's regime. The Pahlavi regime's aggressive modernization program, which systematically expanded into the arts, provided the backdrop for his argument. Al-e Ahmad's analysis offers a vital perspective on how Western-style modernism was adopted by Iranian painters in the 1960s, as seen through the eyes of an insider intellectual concerned with the neglect of Iranian traditions. The article remains a crucial document for understanding the era's cultural debates. Published on ARTMargins Online in 2021 with an introduction by Mohammadreza Mirzaei, the original text is accessible via MIT Press under subscription-only access.