Abstract

Recent studies on artistic modernism pay particular attention to the art histories of the non-West by doing less with Western theoretical conducts and how they define “modern art.” The present book, in line with these studies, surveys artistic modernism while it recognizes “modernism” as a response to confluences of social, economic and political forces. The book thus skips frameworks of a comparative study for the strategies that mainly aim to unveil similarities or dissimilarities between what is modern and what is not. It instead returns to and captures the ways artists conceived their works as modern art; moreover, it collects documents which better display the relation between these works and their contextual causes: What is needed more now is an understanding of the necessities which encouraged artists into creating new forms as absolute responses. Parastoo Jafari completed her master’s degree in art research at IAU Tehran with an interest in artistic developments of post–Islamic Revolution Iran. She received a doctoral degree in art history at LMU Munich focusing on material and intellectual contexts of artistic modernism. She collaborated as research assistant with Walter De Gruyter and University of Munich, contributed to curatorial projects on Iranian art and, as an author and translator, works with topics relating to modern and contemporary art with particular attention to Iran.