فارسیWho is Bahman Mohasses?
Bahman Mohasses was a famous Iranian painter, translator, and sculptor who was born on March 22, 1931, in a Lahijani family in Rasht. The Mohasses family were landowners in Lahijan who were active in the tea and silk trade. According to Hossein Mahjoubi, all members of the Mohasses family had strange personalities, but Bahman Mohasses was more special and different than all of them.
Most of the members of this artist’s family had artistic taste, all of them had a good hand in art. They had the ability to paint and a taste and talent for writing poetry. Bahman Mohasses himself says that he is descended from the Mongols on his father’s side and the Qajars on his mother’s side. Mohammad Habib Mohammadi, who was a Gilani painter and had studied art at the Moscow Academy, accepted Mohasses as a student at his exhibition at the age of 14. Mohammadi may not have been a very famous painter, but Bahman Mohasses remembered him with respect and kindness throughout his life, always referring to him as a capable master. Aydin Aghdashloo says about Mohasses: “When I saw Mohasses, I was 10 years old and we had gone to Habib Mohammadi’s workshop with my father. While I was looking at the paintings in amazement, I saw a young man in a corner who was carefully working on a painting. For a moment, he slowly put his brush on the ground and turned his head towards me, a long prominent nose with a long back of his lip and sky-blue eyes and a penetrating gaze that demanded respect from that very moment. After a while, in 1948, he arrived in Tehran and began to collaborate with various publications and took on the graphic design of these publications. On this path, he met Jalil Ziapour. Ziapour, who had learned modern European art from his studies in France and brought it with him to Iran, gave Mohasses some training in this field. And along with people like Ziapour, Javadipour and Kazemi, they started the Khoros Jangi Association. After the closure of Khoros Jangi, its members began to publish several magazines. One of them is “Claw of the Rooster” which Mohasses is the secretary of. Mohasses left Iran during the prime ministership of Dr. Mossadegh. At first, his family thought that he had gone to Tabriz, but he traveled to Turkey from Tabriz, and there, after informing his family, he began his journey. First, he went from Turkey to Russia, but after the trip he had there, he did not last and decided to go to his first decision, which was France. Because he considered France the cradle of art. But with Manouchehr Sheibani and under the pretext of becoming a Christian, he went to Italy and settled in Rome.
Bahman Mohasses traveled extensively around the world and his works have been able to bridge the gap between the Italian Renaissance, ancient Greece and modern Iran. The characteristics of his works are the unique techniques, use of color and the way in which the background of each piece is created. Unfortunately, many of his works were destroyed or damaged in Iran after the revolution. In addition, Mohasses himself destroyed the remaining artworks that were left behind in Iran with his own hands.
Despite the loss of many of Bahman Mohasses’ works, his surviving works continue to be highly sought after and command high prices in prestigious art galleries around the world. In the next section, we will delve more into Mohasses’ unique style in his paintings and sculptures.
Bahman Mohasses’ paintings are characterized by a distinctive technique in which he uses broad, coarse, and rough brushstrokes to ground his works. He finishes his paintings with the same brushstroke, which creates a sense of seamless texture throughout the piece. Furthermore, the colors in his paintings have a physical, heavy quality, as if they are anchoring and nailing the elements of the painting to the canvas with a sense of gravity.
Bahman Mohasses’ body of work can be divided into two distinct periods: those created before his migration to Italy and those that followed. His earlier paintings are characterized by elegance, careful attention to design, and a careful choice of calm, dark colors. In contrast, his later works display a sense of anarchism and rebellion that is absent from his earlier works. For example, the brushstrokes in his later works seem to strike the canvas with a sense of anger, and the colors are sharp and explosive.