Cubism in Iran: Jalil Ziapour and the Fighting Rooster Association

Abstract

In 1948 the Iranian painter Jalil Ziapour (1920–1999), together with his artistic colleagues, the writer Gholam Hossein Gharib (1923–2003), playwright Hassan Shirvani (birth/death date unknown), and composer Morteza Hannaneh (1922–1989), founded the Fighting Rooster Association (Anjoman-e Ḵorūs-e Jangī) to promote the new emerging modernist arts in Iran. Jalil Ziapour and the Fighting Rooster Association were the leading representatives of cubism in Iran, which arose as a movement in the 1940s and offered Iranian artists like Ziapour a suitable vocabulary to elaborate an artistic subjectivity based on Iranian heritage. At the same time, it also helped to promote the Fighting Rooster Association’s aims to foster democratic hopes for the Iranian nation. This article focuses on Ziapour’s works and texts in light of Orphic cubist theory and highlights the beginnings of modernist art in Iran, the global entanglements of modernism, and the search for an Iranian art beyond orientalist painting traditions and exotic depictions of being the “other.”