Leili Adibfar successfully defends her dissertation “Embodiment and Oil: The Art of Behjat Sadr and Late Pahlavi Iran”
Congratulations Dr. Adibfar!
Embodiment and Oil: The Art of Behjat Sadr and Late Pahlavi Iran
A pioneering figure, Behjat Sadr was active in Iran and internationally before and after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. From 1948 to 1954, she studied painting in the Faculty of Fine Arts (Daneshkadeh-ye Honarha-ye Ziba) at the University of Tehran. Obtaining a scholarship to Italy, Sadr left Tehran for Rome in 1955 to continue her studies in art. In 1959, she returned to Iran as an associate professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts, working for the next twenty years as an artist and educator. After living through the events leading to the revolution, Sadr left Iran for France in 1979, where she continued her art practice until her death in 2009. Drawing on artworks and archival materials from the artist’s Paris-based estate–paintings, collages, and photographs; journals, notes, letters, and interviews—and museum collections, my dissertation investigates Sadr’s embodied painting technique, innovative use of industrial materials, and formal and thematic allusions to oil as the substance underpinning what can be called petromodernity in her practice from 1948 to 1979. Foregrounding these elements, I argue that Sadr’s artistic experimentations—emphasizing personal expression in dialogue with post-1945 existentialist thought rather than the vernacular iconography increasingly common at the time—critically engaged with Iran’s fraught sociopolitical conditions between the 1953 Iranian coup d'état and the 1979 Revolution, a period in which the Pahlavi regime accelerated oil-fueled modernization while simultaneously restricting societal transformations and democratic impulses under the cover of a rising cultural nationalism.