Pia Gottschaller is a Reader at The Courtauld, London, where she teaches across art history, conservation and curatorial programmes. Prior appointments include Senior Research Specialist at The Getty, Los Angeles, Paintings Conservator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and Associate Curator at Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich. Pia is the recipient of a number of research grants and scholarships, most recently from the Getty Foundation (2021). Her publications on artists and movements of the postwar and contemporary period focus on artistic practice.
Abstract
Behjat Sadr (1924-2009) was a pioneer of non-geometric abstraction who moved peripatetically between her home country, Iran, and Italy and France, in a life punctuated by the upheavals of the student protests of 1968 and the Iranian Revolution of 1978. My talk will focus on Sadr’s four formative years at the fine arts academies of Rome and Naples, where she studied with an Italian government grant between 1955 and 1958. The years in Rome impacted Sadr’s future artistic path in crucial ways: in 1956 she began to show at Il Pincio and La Bussola galleries, was awarded the San Vito Romano prize, and participated in the Venice Biennale; she also met and married her second husband, Iranian composer Morteza Hannaneh. The critical, historical and material framework within which I will situate Sadr’s Italian paintings, which are formally indebted to Informel, centres around a momentous process-based discovery in 1955, when a long piece of string she had held fell to the mosaic floor of her room, collecting in “tangled lines with expressive curves.” Subsequently, Sadr said, she replaced her paint tubes “with large paint containers used in the construction industry. I also bought large palette knives and scrapers. I would spread my canvases on the floor [and] stopped using an easel.” This Pollock-inspired approach changed how she related to her own body, in a society that disadvantaged her due to her gender and nationality, and informed the work she became best known for in the 1960s: black ‘oil-slick’ like paint shaped with wood-graining tools on aluminium panels.
Image: Behjat Sadr in Rome, c. 1956-57; courtesy Mitra Goberville, Paris
