Sadr photographed the pipelines and platforms of Iran’s oilfields in the 1970s, whose wealth enabled lavish art patronage under the shah and his empress wife, Farah - a system in which Sadr participated (taking part in the empress’s Shiraz-Persepolis Festival in 1968) but which she also reviled for its favouritism and control. “Black was her passion, her true impulse for more than 20 years,” Montazami says - possibly a metaphor for oil. As the artist noted in her diary, “I did not use my calligraphy or Iranian motifs in my canvas to stimulate national pride among my compatriots or the curiosity of strangers.” Among her radical experiments were Op Art reflective paintings on Venetian blinds (disparaged by one male critic as “housewife art”) and black paint on shiny aluminium. In contrast to Iran’s Saqqakhana school of art, which incorporated Persian motifs into Modern art in the 1960s, Sadr’s feverish abstraction, often inspired by nature, is more lyrical and free, as seen in an untitled oil-on-paper painting at Frieze made shortly before her death. Untitled (2009) by Behjat Sadr will be at Frieze New York at Dastan © ADAGP/DACS. Two of her paintings appeared in the Whitechapel Gallery’s recent show of female abstract expressionists in London. Though Sadr (1924-2009) became known as the first female director of Tehran university’s visual arts department in the early 1970s, her art was not recognised by a major retrospective until the 1990s. She was “one of the first women artists in the global south to make a courageous stand for abstract and experimental practice” from the mid-1950s as an art student in Rome and Naples. “She was a rebel Modernist ahead of her time,” says Morad Montazami, who curated Sadr’s first UK solo show, Dusted Waters, at the Mosaic Rooms in 2018.
Behjat Sadr c1963 © Archives of the Endowment Fund Behjat SADRīehjat Sadr’s photographed hand appears amid thick black strokes applied with a palette knife in a “photo-painting” on view in Realism, a recent Dastan group show in London.
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