The Early Experiments of Manoucher Yektai

December 6, 2025Uncategorized

<img decoding="async" class="wp-image-1602957 size-full-width" title="Untitled, 1953-54" src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/MY-53-015-e1764606722774.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A textured abstract painting with thick, layered strokes of bright and muted colors, including reds, blues, greens, yellows, and creams. The composition features swirling and fragmented shapes resembling a loosely formed still life, with heavy impasto giving the surface a sculptural, three-dimensional quality. The canvas is framed in a simple white frame that contrasts with the vibrant, dynamic forms within the artwork." width="970" height="971" data-caption='In <em>Untitled</em> (1953-54), impasto strokes conjure the impression of a flower bouquet without clearly defining its forms. <span class="media-credit">Courtesy of Karma Gallery and the estate of Manoucher Yektai</span>’>

In the years since his passing, Persian-American painter Manoucher Yektai has begun to shift from the periphery of art history toward its center in a long-overdue reassessment. His work has been showcased in exhibitions around the world, with the latest taking place at Karma in L.A., curated by Negar Azimi. “Beginnings,” which closed last month, surveyed the early experiments of Yektai, from his surrealist-informed abstract inflections of the 1940s to his wondrously nebulous still lifes of the 1960s. On Yektai’s canvases, delicate hues permeate stretches of light and shadow; dense pigments emerge in sharp juxtaposition, cutting into and overlapping one another in brilliant syncopation; contrasting forms wax on impastoed dreamscapes and wane into feathery margins. His paintings offer more than texture; they possess a presence, an ineffable vitality that has accumulated interest over the years.

Nobody painted quite like Manoucher Yektai. Nobody ensnared the flesh of any given object or vista quite as incisively as he could. Nobody rendered the veins of a tomato plant or the countenance of a sitter with such intense bravura. Perhaps as a result of the artist’s withdrawal from the art world, in conjunction with the general reticence of many Western art critics, Yektai’s contributions to Abstract Expressionism have been overwritten in favor of the neat, simplistic narrative that often hangs the mantle of “innovation” on the same familiar names. The work of the viewer or the critic, then, is to go beyond excavating Yektai’s absence from this cast of canonical figureheads to rebuild the narrative from the foundation up—to start uncompromisingly at the beginning.

A black-and-white photo of a man sitting against a floral wallpaper background. He is wearing a white dress shirt with a patterned tie hanging loosely and holds a cigarette in his left hand. His expression is calm and serious, and his posture is relaxed with one arm resting along the back of a sofa or chair.A black-and-white photo of a man sitting against a floral wallpaper background. He is wearing a white dress shirt with a patterned tie hanging loosely and holds a cigarette in his left hand. His expression is calm and serious, and his posture is relaxed with one arm resting along the back of a sofa or chair.

Born in Tehran in 1921, Yektai’s first dream was to become a poet. He didn’t even consider pursuing fine art until he was 18 years old, according to an interview playing on a loop in the gallery. Yektai’s words don’t paginate as much as they punctuate, as a caesura or a comma—a measured conjunction that marries the artist’s early practice to an ambulant and oblique life. In the interview, he recounts a fateful encounter with Mehdi Vishkai. After sitting for the painter, the two talked about art long into the night.

“We talked together about paintings,” Yektai says. “Stayed up until 3, 3:30 in the morning.” The next day, he announced to his father that he wanted to be a painter—one who “sees any object like a poet.” The sudden, singular, almost mythical arrival at his calling makes Yektai seem, if anything, like a man driven by chance or a twist of fate. This confluence of memory, predestination, and more than a little mythmaking courses through Yektai’s confident brushstrokes; it manifests in the lyrical manner through which he reckons with life and essence.

He received his early arts education at the Fine Arts program of Tehran University and later at École des Beaux-Arts in the atelier of Cubist painter André Lhote. While studying in Paris, Yektai would marble his canvases with surrealist-inflected patterns and rich strokes of color. One piece painted in 1949 especially stands out, both for its peculiar diamond shape and for the delicate trails of pigment that twine and spiral across the plane, wandering into slender arabesques and whirligigs. Yektai’s education was primarily within the framework of the 19th-century Beaux-Arts tradition. In Tehran, Yektai was engrossed by the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Magritte. Some critics attempted to prescribe a sort of cultural estrangement to Yektai’s paintings, evaluating them on the apparent absence of Iran’s rich visual legacy.

A diamond-shaped painting in a dark frame, featuring an intricate abstract pattern of interlocking organic shapes. The composition is dominated by earthy tones—browns, ochres, greens, and muted blues—with sharp black forms cutting through the design. The shapes resemble stylized plants, leaves, and flowing lines layered densely across the surface, creating a sense of movement and depth. The artwork hangs against a plain white wall.A diamond-shaped painting in a dark frame, featuring an intricate abstract pattern of interlocking organic shapes. The composition is dominated by earthy tones—browns, ochres, greens, and muted blues—with sharp black forms cutting through the design. The shapes resemble stylized plants, leaves, and flowing lines layered densely across the surface, creating a sense of movement and depth. The artwork hangs against a plain white wall.

In the essay “Yektai: A Search for Modernism” in the 2022 book Manoucher Yektai, Fereshteh Daftari raises the argument that Yektai’s work exists in a liminal state between cultural inheritance and Modernist ambition. “Is transcending the local a betrayal of one’s heritage, a repudiation of one’s ethnicity, a transgression into a territory reserved for those who are, in Barack Obama’s terms, ‘born into imperial cultures’?” he writes. “Yektai’s choice of themes (still life, landscape, portrait) may reflect his hybrid cultural origin; it may also be a manifestation of what came to be termed in Iran as ‘Westoxication,’ or the unhealthy lure of things Western—in other words, an alienation from one’s own culture.”

Did Yektai feel alienated from his Persian roots? Perhaps, but the artist’s biography provides no direct hermeneutical clarity, no fixed measure on whether such feelings, if they existed at all, were momentary or indefinite. Regardless, it is through this state of flux, this rupture and refashioning of identity, that Yektai’s trajectory subtly converges with the New York School of Abstract Expressionists, who were themselves famously pensive and restless. After reading a TIME magazine piece on Jackson Pollock in 1949, seduced by Pollock’s frenetic fugue of paint and unconventional methods of echoing movement across a canvas, Yektai found himself newly compelled.

This early exposure to Pollock led to Yektai’s early experiments with action painting. He began to paint standing up with canvas on the floor, lumbering over his paintings like Prometheus over humanity. Straddling the corners of his canvas, Yektai slashed and sliced color upon the surface with spatulas, scalpels, whips and trowels. He worked the plane with roars of color and impasto, tapering out figuration in whispers of light and shadow.

A textured abstract painting composed of dense, interlocking blocks and brushstrokes of color, dominated by greens, yellows, and earthy tones, with touches of turquoise, lavender, and red. The thickly applied paint creates a mosaic-like surface with visible ridges and cracks. Vertical and horizontal forms intersect throughout the composition, giving the impression of an abstracted cityscape or layered foliage. The work is displayed in a simple white frame against a light-colored wall.A textured abstract painting composed of dense, interlocking blocks and brushstrokes of color, dominated by greens, yellows, and earthy tones, with touches of turquoise, lavender, and red. The thickly applied paint creates a mosaic-like surface with visible ridges and cracks. Vertical and horizontal forms intersect throughout the composition, giving the impression of an abstracted cityscape or layered foliage. The work is displayed in a simple white frame against a light-colored wall.

Some of these pieces were included in “Beginnings,” reflecting thickly painted organic and industrial forms, each of which suggested, though never fully codified. In one untitled piece from 1950, consonant registers of yellow, green and lavender undulate on the canvas like chlorophyll cells or the hazy lights of a city grid. In Still Life with Flowers (1952), paint rises in corollary crests off the canvas in a sort of mosaic of color. By then, Yektai was running with Leo Castelli, Milton Avery, Willem de Kooning and other luminaries of the New York Abstract Expressionist movement. They inspired each other, pushing the frontier of modernism further along through mutual osmosis. Yet, unlike many of his peers, Yektai never fully embraced abstraction, and as time passed, he gravitated increasingly toward figuration. In his portraits of this period, Yektai produced enchanting crescents of faces; the dappling of a brow, flashes of a cheek, a tuft of hair, the soft falling shadow of a nose.

Having shifted from gallery to gallery over the course of several years, Yektai rarely showed after 1959. “Beginnings” wound through this quieter period in his work, where his tomato plant and his own solitude were among his most steadfast muses. In Tomato Plant (1964), a red orb tangled in dirt and vines marks the center. In one untitled 1969 piece, two lonely bowls of fruit rise slightly off the canvas. The pigments form a visual feast, plated and pressed together in dissonant striations, applied with a vigorous, unyielding cadence.

A textured portrait painting with thick, expressive layers of oil paint forming the face and upper body of a person. The figure has dark hair blending into a nearly black background, pale skin tones built from rough, impasto strokes, and vivid red paint suggesting the lips. Greens, yellows, and dark tones shape the clothing, with heavy brushwork creating a raw, emotional surface. The painting is framed in a simple white frame.A textured portrait painting with thick, expressive layers of oil paint forming the face and upper body of a person. The figure has dark hair blending into a nearly black background, pale skin tones built from rough, impasto strokes, and vivid red paint suggesting the lips. Greens, yellows, and dark tones shape the clothing, with heavy brushwork creating a raw, emotional surface. The painting is framed in a simple white frame.

Throughout the 1960s, Yektai’s affair with figuration continued, often culminating in portraiture, which he continued to explore and wrestle with. In one untitled work, dating between 1964 and 1968, a face comes into clearer focus, but only marginally so. In the painting, Yektai flirts with the light, lancing the sitter, toys with the thought of a red lip or the bridge of a nose, but never anchors any of these elements into a fully embodied form. It is this deliberate withholding, this resistance to resolution, that makes Yektai’s work such a marvel today.

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