Women Painters and Representation of Sexuality in the Art of Modern Iran

Along with transforming whole aspects of Iranian’s personal and social lives, Iran’s encounter with the West in current two centuries led to forming the general idea of social equivalence as well as particular concept of equality between men and women. Although these notions found their way to the public sphere through women’s formations and journals and also some specific historical events such as Reza shah’s unveiling of women (1935), they weren’t reflected in Iran’s established art scene of the era. This article searches for interactions between painting and social status in this period. Whether painters have had any notion about social changes regarding sexuality? Whether they’ve used their media to reflect their conceptions about it? If it’s not so what
the reasons could be? This article tries to find answers to such questions in the duration from foundation of Kamal-almolk painting school in 1911, then it goes to modernist paintings of the mid-1940s to the end of 1950s. The method for this research is feminist critique utilizing the concepts of agency and representation. The research shows that centrality of the ideas of modernization/westernization and the concern of modeling in Kamalalmolk school of art and the obsession of national identity among modernist artists of 1930-1950s prevented them to reflect aforementioned social content. Women painters of the two group in both aspects of quantity and professionality as painters were in a low position comparing their male fellows. In representing women there is nothing to be interpreted as a critical content according to women status in paintings of both groups. Instead male and female painters of both styles showed up to take an unconscious uncaring approach in conformation and reproduction of sexual paradigms. Although few paintings of this period indicates obvious alterations in women situation like unveiling of women, it cannot be seen a as a sign of a conscious action containing agency to change toward sexual equality