History of art(west and middle east)- contemporary art

1. Keith Haring
Behjat Sadr
National
Gallery,London
Tehran Museum of
Contemporary Art
AZIZ ART
May 2017

2. Director: Aziz Anzabi
Editor : Nafiseh
Yaghoubi
Translator : Asra
Yaghoubi
Research: Zohreh
Nazari
1-Keith Allen Haring
10-Tehran Museum
of Contemporary
13- National Gallery
17-Behjat Sadr
http://www.aziz-anzabi.com

3. Keith Allen Haring
1

4. Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 –
February 16, 1990) was an
American artist and social activist
whose work responded to the New
York City street culture of the
1980s by expressing concepts of
birth, death, sexuality, and war.
Haring's work was often heavily
political and his imagery
has become a widely recognized
visual language of the 20th
century.
Early life and education
Keith Haring was born in Reading,
Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958. He
was raised in Kutztown,
Pennsylvania, by his mother Joan
Haring, and father Allen Haring, an
engineer and amateur cartoonist.
He had three younger sisters, Kay,
Karen and Kristen.Haring became
interested in art at a very early
age spending time with his father
producing creative drawings.His
early influences included Walt
Disney cartoons, Dr. Seuss,
Charles Schulz, and the Looney
Tunes characters in
The Bugs Bunny Show.In Haring's
teenage years, he left his religious
background behind and hitchhiked
across the country, selling vintage t-
shirts and experimenting with
drugs.He studied commercial art
from 1976 to 1978 at Pittsburgh's
Ivy School of Professional Art but
lost interest in it.He made the
decision to leave after having read
Robert Henri's The Art Spirit (1923)
which inspired him to concentrate
on his own art.
Haring had a maintenance job at
the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts
and was able to explore the art of
Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, and
Mark Tobey. His most critical
influences at this time were a 1977
retrospective of the work of Pierre
Alechinsky and a lecture by the
sculptor Christo in 1978.
Alechinsky's work, connected to
the international Expressionist
group CoBrA, gave Haring
confidence to create larger
paintings of calligraphic images.
Christo introduced him to the
possibilities of involving the public
with his art. Haring's first important
one-man exhibition was in
Pittsburgh at the Center for the
Arts in 1978.

5. He moved to New York to study
painting at the School of Visual
Arts. He studied semiotics with
Bill Beckley as well as exploring
the possibilities of video and
performance art. Profoundly
influenced at this time by the
writings of William Burroughs, he
was inspired to experiment with
the cross-referencing and
interconnection of images.In his
junior/senior year, he was behind
on credits, because his professors
could not give him credit for the
very loose artwork he was doing
with themes of social activism
Early work
He first received public attention
with his public art in subways.
Starting in 1980, he organized
exhibitions at Club 57, which were
filmed by the photographer Tseng
Kwong Chi. Around this time, "The
Radiant Baby" became his symbol.
His bold lines, vivid colors, and
active figures carry strong
messages of life and unity. He
participated in the Times Square
Exhibition and drew animals and
human faces for the first time. That
same year, he photocopied and
pasted provocative collages made
from cut-up and recombined New
York Post headlines around the
city.In 1981, he sketched his first
chalk drawings on black paper and
painted plastic, metal, and found
objects.
By 1982, Haring had established
friendships with fellow emerging
artists Futura 2000, Kenny Scharf,
Madonna and Jean-Michel
Basquiat.He created more than 50
public works between 1982 and
1989 in dozens of cities around the
world.His "Crack is Wack" mural,
created in 1986, is visible from New
York's FDR Drive.He got to know
Andy Warhol, who was the theme
of several of Haring's pieces,
including "Andy Mouse". His
friendship with Warhol would
prove to be a decisive element in
his eventual success.

6. In December 2007, an area of the
American Textile Building in the
TriBeCa neighborhood of New York
City was discovered to contain a
painting of Haring's from 1979.
International breakthrough
In 1984, Haring visited Australia
and painted wall murals in
Melbourne (such as the 1984
'Detail-Mural at Collingwood
College, Victoria') and Sydney and
received a commission from the
National Gallery of Victoria and
the Australian Centre for
Contemporary Art to create a
mural which temporarily replaced
the water curtain at the National
Gallery.He also visited and painted
in Rio de Janeiro, the Musée d'Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris,
Minneapolis and Manhattan.He
became politically active,
designing a Free South Africa
poster in 1985, and in 1986,
painting a section of the Berlin
Wall. He was interested in working
with children and this inspired the
project Citykids Speak on Liberty,
which involved 1,000 children
collaborating on a project for the
centennial of the Statue of Liberty.
When asked about the
commercialism of his work, Haring
said: "I could earn more money if I
just painted a few things and jacked
up the price. My shop is an
extension of what I was doing in
the subway stations, breaking down
the barriers between high and low
art."By the arrival of Pop Shop, his
work began reflecting more socio-
political themes, such as anti-
Apartheid, AIDS awareness, and the
crack cocaine epidemic. He even
created several pop art pieces
influenced by other products:
Absolut Vodka, Lucky Strike
cigarettes, and Coca-Cola.In 1987
he had his own exhibitions in
Helsinki, Antwerp, and elsewhere.
He also designed the cover for the
benefit album A Very Special
Christmas, on which Madonna was
included. In 1988 he joined a select
group of artists whose work has
appeared on the label of Chateau
Mouton Rothschild wine.
Haring also created public murals in
the lobby and ambulatory care
department of Woodhull Medical
and Mental Health Center on
Flushing Avenue, Brooklyn.
.

8. A rare video of Haring at work
shows his energetic style. Haring
wrote: "I am becoming much more
aware of movement. The
importance of movement is
intensified when a painting
becomes a performance. The
performance (the act of painting)
becomes as important as the
resulting painting."
When his friend Jean-Michel
Basquiat died of an overdose in
New York in 1988, he paid homage
to him with his work A Pile of
Crowns, for Jean-Michel Basquiat
Haring was openly gay and was a
strong advocate of safe
sex;however, in 1988, he was
diagnosed with AIDS. In 1989, he
established the Keith Haring
Foundation to provide funding
and imagery to AIDS organizations
and children's programs, and to
expand the audience for his work
through exhibitions, publications
and the licensing of his images.
Haring used his imagery during the
last years of his life to speak about
his illness and to generate activism
and awareness about AIDS.In 1989,
he was invited by the Lesbian and
Gay Community Services Center to
join a show of site-specific
artwork for the building at 208
West 13th Street. Haring chose the
second-floor men's room for his
mural Once Upon a Time.In June,
on the rear wall of the convent of
the Church of Sant'Antonio .he
painted the last public work of his
life, the mural "Tuttomondo"
Fashion
Haring collaborated with Grace
Jones, whom he had met through
Andy Warhol. In 1985, Haring and
Jones worked together on the two
live performances Jones at the
Paradise Garage, which Robert
Farris Thompson has called a
"epicenter for black dance". Each
time, Haring covered Jones' body
with graffiti. He also collaborated
with fashion designers Vivienne
Westwood and Malcolm McLaren
on their A/W 1983/84 Witches
collection, with his artwork
covering the clothing which was
most famously worn by a pink-
wigged Madonna for a
performance of her song "Like a
Virgin" on the British pop-music
programme Top of the Pops and
the American TV dance program
Solid Gold.Haring also collaborated
with David Spada, a jewelry
designer,

9. to design the sculptural
adornments for Jones.
Influences
Haring's work very clearly
demonstrates many important
political and personal influences.
Ideas about his sexual orientation
are apparent throughout his work
and his journals clearly confirm its
impact on his work. Heavy
symbolism speaking about the
AIDS epidemic is vivid in his later
pieces, such as Untitled (cat. no.
27), Silence=Death and his sketch
Weeping Woman. In some of his
works—including cat. no. 27—the
symbolism is subtle,
but Haring also produced some
blatantly activist works.
Silence=Death is almost
universally agreed upon as a work
of HIV/AIDS activism.
Death
Haring died on February 16, 1990
of AIDS-related complications.
As a celebration of his life,
Madonna declared the first New
York date of her Blond Ambition
World Tour a benefit concert for
Haring's memory and donated all
proceeds from her ticket sales to
AIDS charities including AIDS
Project Los Angeles and amfAR; the
act was documented in her film
Truth or Dare. Additionally, Haring's
work was featured in several of Red
Hot Organization's efforts to raise
money for AIDS and AIDS
awareness, specifically its first two
albums, Red Hot + Blue and Red
Hot + Dance, the latter of which
used Haring's work on its cover.
Exhibitions
Haring contributed to the New York
New Wave display in 1981 and in
1982, and had his first exclusive
exhibition in the Tony Shafrazi
Gallery. That same year, he took
part in Documenta 7 in Kassel,
Germany, as well as Public Art
Fund's "Messages to the Public" in
which he created work for a
Spectacolor Board in Times Square.
He contributed work to the
Whitney Biennial in 1983, as well as
in the São Paulo Biennial. In 1985,
the CAPC in Bordeaux opened an
exhibition of his works, and took
part in the Paris Biennial.
Since his death Haring has been the
subject of several international
retrospectives. His art was the
subject of a 1997 retrospective at
the Whitney Museum in New York,

10. curated by Elisabeth Sussman. In
1996, a retrospective at the
Museum of Contemporary Art
Australia was the first major
exhibition of his work in Australia.
In 2008 there was a retrospective
exhibition at the MAC in Lyon,
France. In February 2010, on
occasion of the 20th anniversary
of the artist's death,
Tony Shafrazi Gallery showed an
exhibition containing dozens of
works from every stage of Haring's
mature work.In March 2012, a
retrospective exhibit of Haring's
work, Keith Haring: 1978-1982,
opened at the Brooklyn Museum
in New York.In April 2013, Keith
Haring: The Political Line opened
at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la
Ville de Paris and Le Cent
Quatre In November 2014, then at
the De Young Museum in San
Francisco, California.
Collections
Haring's work is in major private
and public collections, including the
Museum of Modern Art and the
Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York; Los Angeles County
Museum of Art; the Art Institute of
Chicago; the Bass Museum, Miami;
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de
Paris; Ludwig Museum, Cologne;
and Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam.Haring did a wide
variety of public works, including
the infirmary at Children's Village in
Dobbs Ferry, New York,and the
second floor men's room in the
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual &
Transgender Community Center in
Manhattan, which was later
transformed into an office and is
known as the Keith Haring room.

12. Tehran Museum of Contemporary
10

13. Tehran Museum of Contemporary
Art, also known as TMoCA, is
among the largest art museums in
Iran. It has collections of more
than 3000 items that include 19th
and 20th century's world-class
European and American paintings,
prints, drawings and sculptures.
TMoCA also has one of the
greatest collections of Iranian
modern and contemporary art.
The museum was inaugurated by
Empress Farah Pahlavi in 1977,
just two years before the 1979
Revolution.TMoCA is considered to
have the most valuable collections
of modern Western masterpieces
outside Europe and North America
Background
The museum was designed by
Iranian architect Kamran Diba,
who employed elements from
traditional Persian architecture. It
was built adjacent to Laleh Park,
Tehran, and was inaugurated in
1977.The building itself can be
regarded as an example of
contemporary art, in a style of an
underground New York
Guggenheim Museum.
Most of the museum area is
located underground with a circular
walkway that spirals downwards
with galleries branching
outwards.Western sculptures by
artists such as Ernst, Giacometti,
Magritte and Moore can be found
in the museum's gardens
After the Iranian Revolution in
1979, the Western art was stored
away in the museums vault until
1999 when the first post-revolution
exhibition was held of western art
showing artists such as Hockney,
Lichtenstein, Rauschenburg and
Andy Warhol.Now pieces of the
Western art collection are shown
for a few weeks every year but due
to conservative nature of the
Iranian establishment, most pieces
will never be shown.
It is considered to have the most
valuable collection of Western
modern art outside Europe and the
United States, a collection largely
assembled by founding curators
David Galloway and Donna Stein
under the patronage of Farah
Pahlavi.It is said that there is
approximately £2.5 billion worth of
modern art held at the museum.

14. The museum hosts a revolving
programme of exhibitions and
occasionally organises exhibitions
by local artists.
A touring exhibitions was planned
for autumn 2016 in Berlin,
Germany, consisting of a three-
month tour of sixty artworks, half
Western and half Iranian.
The show was to run for three
months in Berlin, then travel to
the Maxxi Museum of 21st
Century Arts in Rome for display
from March through
August.However, the plan has
been indefinitely postponed
because the Iranian authorities
have failed to allow the
paintings to leave the country.
Also in 2017, a larger touring
exhibition is planned for the
Hirshhorn Museum in
Washington, D.C.It is hoped that
revenue from these tours will allow
the museum to upgrade the
infrastructure as well as purchase
new art, something it hasn't done
for over forty years.
Criticism
Purchasing expensive art work and
opening the contemporary art
museum in Tehran by the empress
was a controversial topic at the day
in 1977, as social and economic
inequalities were rising and the
government was a dictatorship not
tolerating the rising opponents. Le
Monde art critic André Fermigier
wrote an article called "A museum
for whom and for what?",
"questioning the link between an
Iranian child and a Picasso or a
Pollock

15. National Gallery
13

16. The National Gallery
is an art museum in Trafalgar
Square in the City of Westminster,
in Central London. Founded in
1824, it houses a collection of over
2,300 paintings dating from the
mid-13th century to 1900.The
Gallery is an exempt charity, and a
non-departmental public body of
the Department for Culture, Media
and Sport.Its collection belongs to
the public of the United Kingdom
and entry to the main collection is
free of charge. It is among the
most visited art museums in the
world, after the Musée du Louvre,
the British Museum, and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Unlike comparable museums in
continental Europe, the National
Gallery was not formed by
nationalising an existing royal or
princely art collection. It came into
being when the British government
bought 38 paintings from the heirs
of John Julius Angerstein, an
insurance broker and patron of the
arts, in 1824. After that initial
purchase the Gallery was shaped
mainly by its early directors,
notably Sir Charles Lock Eastlake,
and by private donations, which
comprise two-thirds of the
collection.The resulting collection is
small in size, compared with many
European national galleries, but
encyclopaedic in scope; most major
developments in Western painting
"from Giotto to Cézanne"are
represented with important works.
It used to be claimed that this was
one of the few national galleries
that had all its works on permanent
exhibition, but this is no longer the
case.
The present building, the third to
house the National Gallery, was
designed by William Wilkins from
1832 to 1838. Only the façade onto
Trafalgar Square remains essentially
unchanged from this time, as the
building has been expanded
piecemeal throughout its history.
Wilkins's building was often
criticised for the perceived
weaknesses of its design and for its
lack of space; the latter problem
led to the establishment of the Tate
Gallery for British art in 1897. The
Sainsbury Wing, an extension to
the west by Robert Venturi and
Denise Scott Brown, is a notable
example of Postmodernist
architecture in Britain. The current
Director of the National Gallery is
Gabriele Finaldi.

17. World War II
Shortly before the outbreak of
World War II the paintings were
evacuated to various locations in
Wales, including Penrhyn Castle
and the university colleges of
Bangor and Aberystwyth. In 1940,
as the Battle of France raged, a
more secure home was sought,
and there were discussions about
moving the paintings to Canada.
This idea was firmly rejected by
Winston Churchill, who wrote in a
telegram to the director Kenneth
Clark, “bury them in caves or in
cellars, but not a picture shall
leave these islands”.Instead a slate
quarry at Manod, near Blaenau
Ffestiniog in North Wales, was
requisitioned for the Gallery's use.
In the seclusion afforded by the
paintings' new location,
the Keeper (and future director)
Martin Davies began to compile
scholarly catalogues on the
collection, helped by the fact that
the Gallery's library was also
stored in the quarry. The move to
Manod confirmed the importance
of storing paintings at a constant
temperature and humidity,
something the Gallery's
conservators had long suspected
but had hitherto been unable to
prove.This eventually resulted in
the first air-conditioned gallery
opening in 1949.
For the course of the war Myra
Hess, and other musicians, such as
Moura Lympany, gave daily lunch-
time recitals in the empty building,
to raise public morale at a time
when every concert hall in London
was closed.A number of art
exhibitions were held at the Gallery
as a complement to the recitals.
The first of these was British
Painting since Whistler in 1940,
organised by Lillian Browse,who
also mounted the major joint
retrospective Exhibition of
Paintings by Sir William Nicholson
and Jack B. Yeats held from 1
January – 15 March 1942, which
was seen by 10,518
visitors.Exhibitions of work by war
artists, including Paul Nash, Henry
Moore and Stanley Spencer, were
also held; the War Artists' Advisory
Committee had been set up by
Clark in order "to keep artists at
work on any pretext".In 1941 a
request from an artist to see
Rembrandt's Portrait of Margaretha
de Geer (a new acquisition)
resulted in the

18. "Picture of the Month" scheme, in which a single painting was removed
from Manod and exhibited to the general public in the National Gallery
each month. The art critic Herbert Read, writing that year, called the
National Gallery "a defiant outpost of culture right in the middle of a
bombed and shattered metropolis".The paintings returned to Trafalgar
Square in 1945.

19. Behjat Sadr
17

20. Behjat Sadr also known as Behjat
Sadr Mahallāti 29 May 1924 - 11
August 2009 was an Iranian
modern art painter whose works
have been exhibited in major cities
across the world, such as New York,
Paris, and Rome.Sadr is known for
her paintings that utilizing
a palette knife on canvases to
create impressionistic paintings
featuring visual rhythm,
movement and geometric shapes.
Biography
Behjat Sadr Mahallāti was born to
Mohammad Sadr-e Mahallāti and
Qamar Amini Sadr in Arak, Iran on
29 May 1924 Sadr began her
studies at the University of Tehran
faculty of fine arts. After her
graduation, she won a scholarship
to the Accademia di Belle Arti in
Rome at the Naples Academy of
Fine Arts.
Sadr's first major exhibition was at
the twenty-eighth Venice Biennial
in 1956. In 1957, Sadr returned to
the University of Tehran as a
member of faculty and taught there
for almost 20 years.There she met
and married her second husband
Morteza Hannaneh
(a well known Iranian musician and
composer) and had her only
daughter, Kakuti (Mitra) Awarded
the Royal Grand Prize at Tehran
Biennial 1962.
In 1979, after the Islamic
Revolution in Iran started Sadr and
her daughter moved to Paris.
Sadr was diagnosed with breast
cancer in the late 1990s, but
continued to paint. She died at age
85 of a heart attack on 11 August
2009 in Corsica.
Legacy
Sadr was the first female
contemporary painter to be
considered on the same level as her
male colleagues in Iran.
In 2006, Sadr was the subject of a
documentary film called Behjat
Sadr: Time Suspended, directed by
Mitra Farahani.Which includes
footage of the artist at work as well
as extensive interviews.

21. Group Exhibitions
1956 – Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy
1957 – Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy
1957 – Galleria Il Pincio, Rome, Italy
1962 – Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy
1962 – The 3rd Tehran Painting Biennial, Tehran, Iran
1962 – São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo, Brazil
1987 – "Iranian Contemporary Art: Four Women", Foxley Leach Gallery,
Washington DC

22. http://www.aziz-anzabi.com