In September, Apadana, Iran’s first dedicated art gallery, is opened in Tehran by artists Mahmoud Javadipour, Hushang Ajudani, and Hossein Kazemi.
Painter Jalil Ziapour, graduate of Tehran University’s Faculty of Fine Arts, founds the Khorous Jangi (Fighting Cock) Art Society along with writer Gholam Hussein Gharib, poet Manuchehr Sheibani, and playwright Hasan Shirvani. Ziapour’s atelier becomes a popular meeting spot of Tehran’s avant-garde, and the society begins publishing the modernist art and literature Khorous Jangi. Ziapour designs the magazine’s cubist-inspired rooster logo.
The Tudeh Party is outlawed after an attempted assassination of the Shah is attributed to a member of the group.
Apadana Gallery closes in July.
In March, the majles (Iranian parliament ) approves a program for oil nationalization.
In April, the parliament votes to install Mohammad Mosaddegh as Prime Minister. The following month, Mosaddegh nationalizes the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Britain freezes Iranian assets, blockades Iran’s ports, and lodges a complaint at the International Co
In July, Mohammad Reza Shah and Mossadegh clash publicly after the latter attempts to reform electoral law to limit the monarch’s power. After addressing the public in a radio broadcast speech, Mossadegh is successful in winning public support through strikes and demonstrations, and forces the Shah to back down from his position.
In August, as Iran continues to suffer economically due to its blockaded and boycotted oil industry, the CIA, British Intelligence, and a cadre of Iranian military leaders engineer a successful coup to overthrow Mosaddegh and replace him as Prime Minister with a Shah loyalist general. Eisenhower proclaims the coup a victory by the Iranian people acting out of “profound love for their monarchy.”
Marcos Grigorian, an Italian educated Iranian painter, opens Galerie Esthétique in Tehran, one of Iran’s earliest and most influential modern art galleries.
Iran joins the Baghdad Pact, a British-backed alliance of Middle East powers designed to curb Soviet influence in the region.
With aid from allied intelligence agencies based in the United States and Israel, the Shah founds SAVAK, an internal security service soon to become notorious for its zeal and ruthlessness in hunting down political dissidents in all arenas of public life.
On April 14th, the First Tehran Biennial, organized by Marcos Grigorian and sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, opens at the Abyaz Palace building in the Golestan Palace Complex. The exhibition features the works of forty-five painters and four sculptors, including the famed poet and painter Sohrab Sepehri, Khorous Jangi Society founders Jalil Ziapour and Manuchehr Sheibani, Naser Oveisi, Parviz Tanavoli, and Marcos Grigorian. This first of five Tehran Biennials features works by Iranian artists representing all the era’s major schools of modernism.
In September, Parviz Tanavoli, Marcos Grigorian, and Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian are among the Iranian attendees of the 1958 Venice Biennale, with Grigorian serving as an International Jury member.
Mohammad Reza Shah marries Farah Diba.
Siah Armajani begins a life of exile in Minnesota.
In April and May, the Second Tehran Biennial is held at the Golestan Palace Complex, featuring the works of sixty-eight artists, including Bahman Mohassess, Sohrab Sepehri, Abolghassem Saidi, Jazeh Tabatabai, and Mohsen Vaziri-Moqaddam.
Abby Weed Gray visits the Second Tehran Biennial on her first trip to Iran. Over the next decade, she acquires a collection that makes her the most important foreign collector of Iranian modern art.
Parviz Tanavoli opens Atelier Kaboud, an art studio and exhibition space located on Tehran’s Vali Asr (then Pahlavi) Avenue.
Jazeh Tabatabai founds the Iran Modern Art Gallery.
The School of Decorative Arts is inaugurated and becomes a rival institution to the Faculty of Fine Arts at Tehran University. Faculty members include Karim Emami, Hushang Kazemi, Parviz Tanavoli, and Marcos Grigorian. Several graduates of this institution became members of the core group of the Saqqakhaneh movement.
Parviz Tanavoli hosts three exhibitions of Charles Hossein Zenderoudi’s works at his Atelier Kaboud studio.
In January, the Shah issues his first major land reform decree, aimed at eliminating remnants of feudal-style land ownership in Iran.
Fiction writer and public intellectual Jalal Al-e-Ahmad writes and clandestinely publishes Gharbzadegi (Westoxication), a polemical attack on the “pro-West” orientation of Iranian intellectuals and their enabling of American and European colonialist/imperialist practices within Iran.
The “Exhibition of Iranian Contemporary Paintings,” featuring fifty works by fourteen artists, including Mansour Ghandriz, Parviz Tanavoli, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, and Behjat Sadr, tours the United States, and represents the first exhibition of modern Iranian art in the United States. After opening in Tehran in February, the exhibition visits Chicago, Washington D.C., New York, Minnesota, Utah, Oregon, Washington State, Idaho, New Mexico, and Texas.
In April, the Third Tehran Biennial is held at Abyaz Palace, exhibiting works by 101 artists, including Hossein Kazemi, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, Mansureh Hosseini, Leyly Matine-Daftary, Massoud Arabshahi, and Bahman Borujeni. The exhibition catalogue notes “a vein of independent national art with local coloring.”
The Shah initiates a series of major reforms known as the “White Revolution,” including major land reform, a new electoral law granting suffrage to women, the creation of a national literacy corps aimed to improve education in rural areas, and the privatization of formerly nationalized manufacturing industries.
In June, Ayatollah Khomeini, a charismatic, activist cleric, is arrested after a series of sermons denouncing the monarchical regime as illegitimate. The following year, he is exiled to Turkey and then moves to Iraq, where he remains in exile until 1978.
Art Critic Karim Emami coins the term “Saqqakhaneh” to describe Charles Hossein Zenderoudi’s works on display at the Third Tehran Biennale. According to Emami, the themes, geometric motifs and color choice of Zenderoudi’s paintings are evocative of the design of the saqqakhaneh public watering enclaves, which represent a traditionalism that is highly familiar, domestic, and religious (Shi’ite Islamic) and contrasts with the lofty grandeur of monumental Islamic and pre-Islamic art and architecture in Iran. He notes Parviz Tanavoli, Faramarz Pilaram, Sadeq Tabrizi, and Massoud Arabshahi as important members of this “new Iranian school.”
Talar-e Iran (Iran Hall) later renamed Ghandriz Hall, is founded by Mansour Ghandriz and Morteza Momayez with the help of their colleagues Faramarz Pilaram and Sadeq Tabrizi. The gallery hosts several exhibitions of avant-garde art, featuring the works of Bijan Saffari, Marcos Grigorian, Parviz Tanavoli, and others.
In April, the Fourth Tehran Biennial is held at Abyaz Palace, featuring works by 113 artists. The exhibition catalogues notes an increase in abstract, nonrepresentational works, alongside the continued presence of the neo-traditionalist themes brought to the fore at the Third Biennial.
Siah Armajani produces Warren Report, a hand-traced replica of the text of the investigation of the Kennedy assassination.
Amir Abbas Hoveyda is appointed Prime Minister.
In November, the Iran-America Society hosts “Art in Iran,” an exhibition organized by Karim Emami which highlights works by contemporary artists.
In June, the Fifth Tehran Biennial is held at Tehran’s Ethnographic Museum, and exhibits the work of thirty-eight Iranian artists as well as thirty-seven artists from Turkey and Pakistan. The last of the Tehran Biennials, this is also the first to feature non-Iranian artists, a reflection of the organizers’ desire to expand the exhibition’s scope to Iran’s neighbors and eventually throughout Asia.
“Rasht 29,” club/bar/art space, is founded by Kamran Diba, Parviz Tanavoli, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, and Roxana Saba and becomes a gathering place for Tehran’s avant-garde. The club is located near Tehran Polytechnic University, now Amirkabir University of Technology, in central Tehran. The décor is designed to combine the look and feel of traditional Iranian coffeehouses and European cafes. The club eventually hosts Iran’s first auction of contemporary art, attended by Empress Farah Pahlavi and Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda.
The Family Protection Law is introduced, reforming marriage, divorce, and family law in areas previously under the jurisdiction of Islamic family law.
The Center for Iranian Studies at Columbia University in New York City hosts an exhibition of modern Iranian painting.
In October, the Shah and now-Empress Farah hold their coronation ceremony at the Golestan Palace complex.
In August, the first annual Shiraz Arts Festival is held at the ruins of Persepolis, organized under the auspices of Empress Farah Pahlavi and sponsored by National Iranian Radio and Television. Over the next eleven years, the Festival hosts musicians, performing arts groups, composers and directors from around the world including Iannis Xenakis, Peter Brook, John Cage, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Maurice Béjart, Robert Wilson, and Merce Cunningham, with a particular emphasis by the mid-1970s on the avant-garde and experimental.
In February, a Marxist guerilla group attacks a gendarmerie post in Siahkal village, and initiates the first of several anti-government guerilla attacks over the course of the decade.
In October, Persepolis hosts an international celebration in honor of the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire. A grand tent city hosts political leaders, members of royalty, and dignitaries from around the world. The event is hotly criticized by members of leftist as well as religious opposition groups.
Later in October, the Shah inaugurates the Shahyad Tower (now renamed Azadi Tower), designed by architect Hossein Amanat, in Tehran as a commemoration and conclusion to the 2,500th anniversary celebrations.
In August, the Shiraz Arts Festival hosts Iannis Xenakis’s Polytope de Persepolis, a massive multimedia installation set in the ruins of Darius’s palace in Persepolis. The work features electronic music played at six multitracked listening stations interspersed throughout the site, a light show incorporating natural bonfires, lasers, and projectors, and a performance featuring groups of torch-bearing children.
Faramarz Pilaram’s work is exhibited at Paris’s Galerie Cyrus.
The Shah leads OPEC in a quadrupling of oil prices.
In March, the Shah announces that all legal political parties will be merged into a new single party, the Rastakhiz (Resurgence) party, headed by Prime Minister Hoveyda.
Parviz Tanavoli’s Heech Tablet incorporates elements invoking pre-Islamic cuneiform script as well as Shi’ite shrine grillwork.
The Shah introduces a stronger version of the 1967 Family Law.
Behjat Sadr’s works are exhibited at Paris’s Galerie Cyrus
The Inaugural Exhibition of the Grey Art Gallery features many works by contemporary Iranian artists.
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