The Iranian Poet Who Became an American Action Painter

A new book introduces two Manoucher Yektais: the stateless, anti-historical Modernist painter and the poet writing narrative verse exclusively in Farsi.

The Iranian Poet Who Became an American Action Painter

HYPERALLERGIC

by Tim Keane– July 21st 2022

How did the Iranian-born artist Manoucher Yektai — a narrative poet and still-life painter who died in 2019 at the age of 98 — end up lumped in with American Abstract Expressionism and its subspecies, famously termed “action painting”?

Answers to this question emerge in the biographical and critical essays in Manoucher Yektai (Karma Publications, 2022). Its contributors wrestle awkwardly with these counterproductive art historical labels while setting the record straight about the Iranian-American poet and painter who won critical acclaim among New York’s avant-garde of the 1950s — Harold Rosenberg was a fan, as was Mark Rothko — before Yektai slid out of favor, even as he continued to write poetry and paint well into this century.

Featuring hundreds of color reproductions of Yektai’s work (he trafficked almost entirely in oil paint on canvas) along with personal photographs from a long life, Karma’s catalogue reveals a painter with a signature style refined across 70 years of disciplined output. Its hallmarks are deeply saturated colors, hyperactive impasto (often applied with a trowel and even a whip), and an all-over picture plane — he routinely painted standing over canvases placed on the floor, producing the illusion of aerial perspectives on the imagery. He applied these strategies to an early phase of pure abstraction and then to buoyant semi-abstract still lifes, developing that repertoire further to include portraiture, interiors, and landscapes.

Occasioned by last fall’s terrific retrospective on Yektai at Karma Gallery — along with a representative artwork, “Tomato Plant” (1959), on display throughout this year at SFMOMA — this new catalogue adds further fuel to the artist’s posthumous revival. “Tomato Plant” exemplifies how Yektai honed a deceptively naïve technique that yields an aesthetic with a doubling effect: his paintings convey manic immediacy and expressive nuance at once.

As is the case with Yektai’s explicitly representational paintings, the viewer can read “Tomato Plant” as a visual poem communicated through self-contained calligraphic and multi-toned greens, blues, and whites. At the same time, its horizontal and vertical brushwork maps vegetal textures and unruly growth — sunlight, stalks, leaves, and fruit dramatized in spontaneous ecological interaction.