The Calligrapher

Maliheh Afnan (1935-2016) is a recognised master of the modernist movement in Iranian art history with a distinctive oeuvre nearly entirely based on works on paper. She could claim a multiplicity of identities: Persian parents, Palestinian birthplace, Lebanese, French, American and English ‘homelands’. In her exhilic life, she brilliantly drew inspiration from the richness of those diverse places and cultural possibilities. She was born in Haifa to Persian parents, who were exiled to Palestine of the British Mandate (Israel of today), alongside Baháʼu'lláh, the prophet-founder of the Baha’i Faith. Although she and her family became estranged from the Baha’i community, she absorbed a deep commitment to the potentialities in modern art of the explorations of that inner life often associated with such modernists as Mark Tobey, with whom she also became a friend. Script - Arabic and Persian letters - became her preferred visual language, deployed in repeat patters that resemble texts from ancient books but are not intended to be read or to make sense. Rather, it is the evocations through line, gauze-like patterns, and vaguely defined forms, some of which are faces, that her works connect with her sense of a cultural ‘homeland’. The brilliance of Maliheh Afnan lies in the way she subtly moves the viewer to uncover an unwavering serenity that is born out of contradictions: between her roots in the East and her life in the West, her Persian and Arabic heritage and her British and French adopted homes.

Afnan’s portraits, of which The Calligrapher is one of the most moving, exude the serenity of an inner resolution, like her famously ethereal veils. Faces of people she knew, admired or encountered encapsulate, in their quiet gazes and their gentle silhouettes, the complexities of the person’s internal landscape of feelings and thoughts. Afnan’s scribe makes the very materials with which she depicted the portrait - in a mix of dry pigments, inks, colours and paper - to produce the effects of old patinas on ancient skin, surface qualities that allude to archaeological sites, and to her affinity for archaeology and ruins that graced the places where she grew up.

Gift of the artist's estate

From the Baroque to Today: New Acquisitions of Works on Paper, The Courtauld Gallery, London, 23/02/2024-27/05/2024

Maliheh Afnan, Faces, Traces and Places, exhibition catalogue, Rose Issa Projects, London, 2009