Editor’s note: This is an article from the Spring 1999 issue of UCLA Magazine.
Irangeles. The neologism coined as the title to the 1994 book and accompanying photo exhibition at the Fowler Museum says it all. In Southern California, the largest and most ethnically and religiously diverse Iranian community in the western world has flourished in the 20 years since the Islamic Revolution. They have settled wide swaths of the San Fernando Valley, Orange County and Los Angeles’ Westside, infusing the region with their vigorous cultural, intellectual and economic presence.
It is in the context of the Persian presence in and around UCLA that Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch, 1785–1925, at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center through May 9, takes on more than merely aesthetic interest. The exhibition proposes that the history shared by so many living within the university’s orbit ought to be understood in a new light.
The presence is evident everywhere, from the rug merchants on La Cienega Boulevard to the groceries, bakeries and gas stations along the avenues running under the 405 Freeway to the Persian restaurants, bookstores and service establishments dotting Westwood Boulevard, comprising as Farsied a stretch of pavement as can be found in the Southland. And UCLA has become a community hub, however informal, with the Center for Near Eastern Studies as a conduit and sponsor for many academic and cultural activities. Iranian-American students, in fact, constitute the second-largest immigrant group on campus — the first being all Pacific Asians. The Iranian Studies Program, a significant element of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, is among the oldest and largest such program in the nation and is the only place in the U.S. from which a student can earn a B.A. in Iranian studies.
It is, by and large, an educated and affluent community. Those who left Iran with the Shah in 1979 were highly westernized, and mainly of the professional and entrepreneurial classes — doctors, engineers, architects, academics, merchants, publishers, artists and the like. The Iranian presence in the United States probably constitutes the most sophisticated immigrant population since the German-speaking refugees of the later 1930s.
If educated Iranians, such as those who have flocked here, think at all of the Qajars, the ruling dynasty that preceded the reign of the Pahlavis, they regard their period as one of decadence. Certainly, according to Hossein Ziai, director of UCLA’s Iranian Studies Program, the Qajars’ last years, between the constitutional revolution of 1906–1907 and the accession of Riza Shah Pahlavi (the elder) in 1925, did not reflect well on the dynasty. But Ziai and several essayists in the hefty and engrossing catalogue to the exhibition all stress that the Qajars maintained the remarkable tradition of tolerance that has characterized Iranian civilization ever since its Biblical days of empire. And this tradition of multiculturalism stood Iran in good stead, politically and culturally, in the 19th century as before. It permitted social structures and artistic practices to remain stable, yet open to change, in times of ambitious expansion and equally in times of contraction and confusion. The Qajar epoch was both.
Royal Persian Paintings seeks to mitigate that epoch’s decadent reputation. While not obscuring the problems of the regime and its times, the exhibition insists that we take a new look at Qajar art and artifacture, and that we reconsider the era as a period of interest unto itself, as a notable development in the history of Persian (and Islamic) art and, for better or worse, as the foundation of modern Iran’s condition.
The emergence of Iran’s modern middle class, and the process of westernization that fed off and spurred this emergence, began in Qajar society. Indeed, what Professor Ziai calls a “disharmony between tradition and westernization” began under the Qajars. Such disharmony led to the alienation of Iran’s non-westernized working classes from its westernized intelligentsia and professional classes, and ultimately to the fundamentalist revolution. Ziai terms this class-cultural split a “schizophrenia” particular to 20th-century Iran — similar to Russia under Peter the Great, perhaps, but nowhere more profound in our era than in the Persian kingdom. Unlike Kamal Ataturk’s westernization of post-Ottoman Turkey, the Shah’s pro-Western outlook was political, cultural and economic, but not ideological, and did not extend far beyond the court — a condition as true under the Qajars as under the Pahlavis.
Admittedly, the Qajars did not exactly revive the grandeur and dominance of the Biblical era or the Safavid dynasty of the 16th and 17th centuries. They had the misfortune to preside over an Iran squeezed more and more tightly between the encroachments of Western powers — the Russians and the English — who replaced the Ottomans as the primary threat to the Persian Empire. If they couldn’t return to bygone days of glory, however, the Qajars maintained power in part by recalling the magnificence of an earlier Persia.
The presence, welcome or otherwise, in Persian consciousness of European civilizations thus began to increase shortly after the Qajars came to power. Halfway through Royal Persian Paintings, we see that influence make itself felt as the treatment of princely subjects becomes more and more “natural” in a Western sense — without, however, losing the powerful decorative fundaments of Persian artistic traditions.
The Qajars’ reasons for developing a new kind of painting were as much propagandistic as aesthetic; indeed, there is strong evidence that the great early-Qajar ruler Fath’ Ali Shah, nephew of the dynasty’s founder, Aqa Muhammad Khan, sought to institute a kind of cultural Renaissance in his court. It was a way of renewing, and thus arrogating, the royal splendor of earlier dynasties. It was also a way of providing coherence to Aqa Muhammed Khan’s unification of the far-flung empire.
A new appreciation for this artistic achievement, and a resulting re-evaluation of the supposedly decadent Qajar dynasty and the Iran it ruled, emerges strongly in Royal Persian Paintings. “We’re asking people to look at a whole new facet, not just of Iranian art but of Islamic art in general,” says Diba. For the casual visitor, barely aware of the opulent, relatively intimate, artistic traditions that have most often represented Islamic Persian art in the history books, the traditionally elaborate patterning and rich coloration of the pictures on view contrast almost vertiginously with the high degree of realism evident in their depiction of flora, fauna, landscape, architecture and especially people.
This grandeur, according to Diba, should show “that the Islamic world has a lot of diversity in it” — more, certainly, than people in the West are aware of. For those cognizant of recent non-Western history, this collection fills one of the widest-yawning gaps in Near Eastern civilization. How many of us could even name the dynasty that ruled Iran in the 19th century, much less describe what they achieved politically or artistically?
Many, if not most, of those who could are the inheritors of that cultural patrimony, and it is those Iranians who will find Royal Persian Paintings at once the least and the most surprising. They grew up with these paintings, but not necessarily with a great respect for them as art. Compared to the Western examples they emulated and sometimes imitated, the Qajar canvases can seem awkward, indecisive, even crude; and compared to Safavid and other earlier Persian artworks, Qajar paintings might appear gauche and overblown. But in its very durability and persistence, Qajar art insists we look at it as a fecund hybrid, not as a sterile crossbreed. Royal Persian Paintings identifies a stable course of development in Qajar painting, tracing the evolution of its stylizations as well as describing the history that produced it.
Royal Persian Paintings also reveals characteristics in 19th-century Iranian art that we would consider inconsistent, but which recur with such regularity in the picture-making of this era that we are forced to reconsider what “consistency” consists of in the first place. If these paintings marry European and Persian conventions in a manner that by Western standards seems at best unresolved, we have to note that the manner is itself constant. The combination of Eastern and Western approaches is just as transparent, just as uneasy and just as beguiling in 1900 as it is in 1800. Even while striving for greater naturalism after the mid-19th century, the only time Qajar painters abandon native compositional principles is when they make direct copies of Western art. And the only time they abandon the traditional subject matter of royal portraiture, court life and historical painting is after the 1906–1907 revolution, when non-princely figures and activities — what we refer to in the West as genre painting — emerge as subjects of interest.
Royal Persian Paintings makes many other points, large and small, in favor of Qajar-dynasty art. Its pioneering resuscitation of this once-overlooked period fills a gap in the cultural history of Iran — and thus in the cultural history of UCLA’s extended family and neighborhood.
