Painted circa 1949, Manoucher Yektai’s Untitled captures a pivotal moment in his overall career, when the young Iranian American painter stood at the threshold between two influential orbits—Paris and New York. Balancing between the French avant-garde and the nascent eminence of Abstract Expressionism in the New York art world, Yekai would become immersed. The painting oscillates between still life and landscape, gliding into the realm of abstraction. The resulting composition excites the eye with intricate layers of color and form, offering a rare glimpse into the artist’s early, surrealist-inflected style. Following, the creation of Untitled, Yektai held a string of successful exhibitions at Grace Borgenicht Gallery in the 1950s, marking the first time an Iranian-born artist had ever held a solo show outside of Iran. While garnering acclaim in New York, Yektai became acquainted with Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Robert Motherwell, as well as the critic Clement Greenberg, who went so far as to call Yektai a “founding member” of the Abstract Expressionists (B. Duke, “The Six-Hundred-Year Plan: The Eternal Confidence of Manoucher Yektai”, Karma Books, 2022, p. 61). Famed gallerist Leo Castelli took a liking to Yektai’s work and brought a group of painters to Yektai’s 1951 landmark show, including Mark Rothko (B. Duke, “The Six-Hundred-Year Plan: The Eternal Confidence of Manoucher Yektai”, Biddle Duke, Karma Books, 2022, p. 61). Yektai himself, however, refused any one style or school, stating in an interview with the New York Times “I try to be a contemporary painter… a new painter, a painter of the time, the kind of painting that you have not seen or experienced before. I don’t like to be considered part of any group” (L. Van Gelder, “A Studio in my Pocket” New York Times, Jan. 9, 1983). Yektai's rebellion against categorization is reflected in his consistent devotion to experimentation and modernism, exemplified by the energetic fusion of forms seen in Untitled.

Yektai’s most prized pre-1950 paintings are defined by their surrealist sensibility, reflecting the influence of postwar European modernism, which he was exposed to while living in Paris from 1947 to 1949. Untitled is exemplary of this early body of work: its protean shapes of biomorphic forms galvanize the canvas with a kinetic energy recalling the whimsicality of Joan Miró. The shapes within the canvas also appear to float like Jean Arp’s buoyant amoebas, while the piece’s composite layering evokes André Masson’s sense of textured depth. Illuminated by a bright yellow background, the surface of Untitled seems to pulsate despite its flatness—a result of Yektai’s idiosyncratic shapes, which appear to swim in a three-dimensional, zero-gravity space. Filling the canvas yet stopping short of the edges, the work embodies a controlled chaos that inspires inexhaustible intrigue. Yektai’s rendering displays his familiarity with European modernism—one he places in dialogue with his unique transnational idiom—forming a painterly language entirely of his own making.

Yektai’s years in Paris were decisive for his development as a burgeoning painter walking a tight rope between abstraction and figuration. Studying under the renowned French Cubists André Lhote and Amédée Ozenfant, he absorbed avant-garde philosophies and the structural rigor of their form. Upon returning to New York in 1950, Yektai quickly became entrenched in the city’s artistic vanguard. During this time, his work evolved toward the tactile, impasto surfaces for which he would become widely known. Yet Untitled, painted just before this shift in the artist’s style, retains a remarkable sense of surrealist and cubist influence that distinguishes it from the more explosive canvases of his New York contemporaries. “Yektai inserted himself into a tradition that began with Cézanne and evolved via Pollock and de Kooning, but not necessarily in a Greenbergian sense,” writes Thomas McEvilley, defining the artist’s practice as “a search for Modernism, and for a participation in Modernism—indeed, a home in it” (F. Daftari, “Yektai: A Search for Modernism”, Karma books, 2022, p. 14).

Born in Tehran in 1921, Yektai was not only an academically trained painter in his home country, but also a renowned poet. He began writing in Farsi at the age of eight and would go on to produce several epic poems and four collections that received recognition throughout Iran. Yektai’s poetry remained a constant companion to his painting, lending his visual work a sense of spiritual and geographical rhythm. “The way he did his paintings is the way he did his poetry,” his friend Alimorad Fadeienia observed, “the roots of it are Iran: the reds are the reds of Isfahan, the blues of the tiles we see everywhere in Iran” (B. Duke, “The Six-Hundred-Year Plan”, Karma Books, 2022, p. 88). His poetry collection Falgoosh (“listening in the dark for one’s fortune”) explored themes of chance, destiny, and the limits of human knowledge—resonating with the spontaneous freedom of his painterly method put on display in Untitled. More generally, the calligraphy of Farsi, with its fluid continuum between gesture and symbol, offered a visual corollary to Yektai’s brushwork. While his poetry often referenced Iranian language, culture, and politics, his paintings articulated more universal aims. As an Iranian artist in Paris and later New York, Yektai was simultaneously a participant and an outsider in the movements that defined their respective artistic epochs. This duality endowed his art with a paradoxical yearning—for both belonging and independence, familiarity and universality. “My family went into politics,” Yektai once said. “I didn’t want to be a member of this club… I was alien, an outsider. I was always outside” (B. Duke, “The Six-Hundred-Year Plan”, Karma Books, 2022, p. 88). In this self-chosen exile—somewhere between Iran, Paris, and New York—he found a poetic and painterly voice entirely his own, one that continues to resonate across cultures and time. Iranian critic Dariush Kiaras wrote “The truth is, Yektai has always been yekta” a word meaning entirely unique (D. Kiaras, “Profile: Manoucher Yektai,” Tandis 16, no 134, September-October 2008: p: 4-5).

Yektai’s paintings have entered major American and international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. In 1975, Empress Farah Pahlavi purchased a large canvas for Tehran’s Museum of Modern Art, now home to one of the Middle East’s most valuable collections of post-war painting. In 1981, however, Yektai retreated from the art world, focusing on poetry, painting, and his family, largely in seclusion. “He was a great painter,” recalled his gallerist from this time Alex Rosenberg, “who did everything he could not to be one. (B. Duke, “The Six-Hundred-Year Plan”, Karma Books, 2022, p. 49). Curator Donna Stein—then an advisor to Empress Farah Pahlavi—later organized a major Yektai exhibition, which helped renew interest in his oeuvre in the late 1980s. A resurgence of admiration followed and continues to this day.Untitled stands as an archetypical work in Yektai’s vast oeuvre, one that bridges continents and traditions, embodying Yektai’s modernist inquiry as one of America’s—and Iran’s—most singular modern painters.