Tracing Sasanian Art Historiography: The Intersection of Japanese and Persian Art Histories in the Early 20th Century

Abstract
In his 1925 lecture in Tehran, titled “Persian Art and Culture,” American art historian Arthur Upham Pope highlighted the “inspiration and artistic guidance” that Japan and China received from Persia. Pope presented this as an example of the “contributions made by Persia to the cultural and spiritual life of the world.” This paper examines the historiography of Sasanian art in Japan and Europe to elucidate how the notion of a connection between Japan and Persia was established in the early 20th century. In the late 19th century, a textile with pearl roundel and hunting motif was discovered in Horyuji Temple in Nara, prompting questions about the origin of the textile and, more broadly, the origins of Japanese art. In his doctoral dissertation, On the Architecture of Horyuji Temple, Japanese architectural historian Ito Chuta attributed the textile’s pattern to a “Sasanian” origin. Ito’s dissertation was later introduced to Europe, where it became a reference point in discussions of both Japanese and Persian art history. This paper explores the circulation of ideas surrounding the so-called “Sasanian” textiles to understand how Japanese and European art historians shaped discourses on Japan-Persia relations and how these ideas were subsequently received in Iran.

Biography
Zahra Moharramipour is Assistant Professor at International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Her research focuses on the formation of the idea of “Persia” in early 20th-century Japan, employing an interdisciplinary approach that integrates art history, architectural history, archaeology, history, and literature. She was previously a JSPS fellow at the National Museum of Ethnology and received her PhD in Comparative Literature and Culture from the University of Tokyo in 2023. Her doctoral dissertation, Expanding the Concept of the “Orient” in Early Twentieth Century Japan: Perceptions of Persia among Ito Chuta and the Japanese Architects, Art Historians and Historians, was awarded the Kim So-un Prize from the University of Tokyo Society of Comparative Literature and the Ichiko Memorial Award from the University of Tokyo College of Arts and Sciences. A monograph based on her dissertation, written in Japanese, is forthcoming in 2025.

Reception of Persian Art Objects in Japan

Abstract
There has been a wide-spread understanding that Persian art had little, if any, influences over Japanese culture. In fact, there has been numerous encounters between Persian arts and Japanese audience. In this paper, I will explore two prominent cases of these encounters.
The first part of this paper explores the contexts and modes in which Persian art objects, including textiles and carpets, were received in early modern Japan. Due to the preeminence of Persian textiles, robes, and carpets, Persian rulers often used them as diplomatic gifts since ancient times. Similarly, in the 16th century, the Portuguese brought Persian textiles and carpets to Japan as gifts. Recognizing the value that the Japanese placed on these rare items, the Dutch also used them as diplomatic gifts during the Edo period. From the 18th century onwards, powerful merchants in Kyoto utilized Persian carpets as float covers during the annual Kyoto Gion Festival to demonstrate their wealth and cultural sophistication. Another notable context in which Persian textiles were integrated into Japanese culture was the tea ceremony. Tea masters crafted covers for tea caddies from imported Persian woven textiles, which further elevated their value and reputation. Even tiny fragments of Persian woven textiles were preserved in albums and highly regarded among tea circle members.
The second part of this paper focuses on Japanese painters who traveled to Europe to study Western-style painting in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period when interest in Islamic art was flourishing among European artists and collectors. Following the publication of Owen Jones’ works on the Alhambra and The Grammar of Ornament, many European artists drew inspiration from Islamic art objects. William Morris, for instance, collected Persian carpets and famously incorporated their designs into his own art. Prominent artists and museums alike accumulated Islamic art, with the “Arab Hall” in Frederick Leighton’s residence serving as a notable example of such collections.
In this environment, Japanese painters encountered Islamic art for the first time. Some visited leading institutions such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they studied textiles, ceramics, and paintings from the Islamic world. These artists returned to Japan with Persian textiles and other Islamic artifacts, which they used to inspire and educate young Japanese artists. Interestingly, Japanese artists who traveled to India in the early 20th century also encountered Persian paintings alongside Mughal art. This paper aims to illuminate these lesser-known connections between Japanese artists and Islamic, particularly Persian, art.

Biography
Yumiko Kamada is an Associate Professor at Keio University. She received her B.A. from Keio University in 2002, M.A. from the University of Tokyo in 2004, and Ph.D. from the Institute of Fines Arts, New York University in 2011. She specializes in Islamic art history. After the publication of her book, Jutan ga Musubu Sekai: Kyoto Gion Matsuri Indo Jutan e no Michi (Carpets that Connect the World: Indian Carpets and Their Journey toward the Kyoto Gion Festival, University of Nagoya Press, 2016), she received several awards including the Japan Academy Award. Her recent research focuses on Japanese artists’ encounters with and reactions to Islamic art during their stays in Europe in the early 20th century. Among the articles she wrote are “The Material Translation of Persian and Indian Carpets and Textiles in Early Modern Japan” in In-Between Textiles, 1400-1800: Weaving Subjectivities and Encounters, Amsterdam University Press, 2023, pp. 305-326; “The Attribution and Circulation of Flowering Tree and Medallion Design Deccani Embroideries,” in Sultans of the South: Arts of the India’s Deccan Courts, 1323-1687, Yale University Press, 2011, pp. 132-147; “A Taste for Intricacy: An Illustrated Manuscript of Mantiq al-Tayr in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” Orient 45 (2010), pp. 129-175.

Reimagining the Persianate and Exotic in Indo-Saracenic Palaces of Hyderabad and Mysore

Abstract
This paper discusses as to how Indo-Saracenic architecture which developed in late-nineteenth-century India reflected the Victorian imagination of the exotic, comprising of Persian, Islamic, Oriental, and other non-Western labels, and to what extent it impacted Indian society to redefine its identities through the transformation of traditional urban spaces into hybrid visualscapes. Focusing on Hyderabad and Mysore, two of the most prominent princely states in the Indian Empire both located in the southern Deccan where Shi’a Islam and Persian culture occupied a distinctive position since the fourteenth century, the paper analyses stylistic features of their palace complexes constructed under British supervision by tracing different sources of architectural shapes and decorative motifs and examines visual implications of those architectural idioms in political, social, and cultural contexts.
It is not surprising that the adoption of the Indo-Saracenic style in Muslim-ruled Hyderabad and Hindu-ruled Mysore signified different meanings and values. Claiming the origin of Persian lineage, the Nizams of Hyderabad actively incorporated the architectural details of the Shi’ite Qutb Shahis of Golconda into their buildings. The present Khilwat Mubarak (durbar hall) completed in 1916 at the Chowmahalla palace shows an eclectic character consisting of Hindu, Mughal, and Qutb Shahi elements, among which intricate plasterworks on wall surfaces are unique features to Hyderabad’s Indo-Saracenic architecture representing the Nizams’ perceptions of an inheritance of the Persianate Deccan. On the other hand, the Mysore palace completed in 1912 demonstrates more modernised and hybrid features culminating an extravaganza of Indo-Saracenic palaces. Stained-glass ceilings, cast-iron pillars, and encaustic floor tiles all from Britain and the adoption of a peacock motif as a symbol of kingship indicates the rulers’ polysemic identities of “India” rather than Mysore, Deccan, or Hindu, reinvented through the negotiation between the Victorian notions of the exotic and the Maharajas’ strategies of self-representations of colonial modernity.

Biography
Aki Toyoyama is Associate Professor at the Faculty of International Studies in Kindai University (Osaka, Japan). Her research focuses on the history of colonial art and architecture of South Asia, with a particular attention to the global trade of decorative tiles called majolica made in interwar Japan and diffused not only in Japan’s colonies but also in the Straits Settlements, India, and other British and European colonies in the Indian Oceanic world. Her publications include Divine Affection: Enchanting Images of Hindu Deities (Co-author, National Museum of Ethnology, 2003, in Japanese), “A Political History of Handicrafts and Exhibitions in Colonial India” in The Journal of the Society for Arts and Anthropology, Vol. 39 (2023, in Japanese), The Vibrance of Indian Fabrics (Co-author, Showado, 2021, in Japanese), and “Visual Politics of Japanese Majolica Tiles in Colonial South Asia” in The Journal of Indian and Asian Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2020).

Museums in Iran and Identity Formation – Continuities, Changes, and Challenges

Abstract
Museums act as gatekeepers of cultural narratives and serve as reflections of societal power dynamics. This presentation highlights the role of museums in Iran to define “Iranian art” and illustrates the ongoing interplay between culture and power by examining how “national culture” and “foreign cultures” have been collected and represented in major museums inside the country since the late 19th century. At the beginning of the presentation, some features of the first royal museum in Iran, which was created inside the Golestan Palace in 1876, will be briefly introduced. Then, the history of cultural policy from the 20th century onward will be summarized. Iran’s cultural policy has evolved under two distinct ideologies: the Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), which promoted modernization and Westernization, and the Islamic Republic, established after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. However, a closer look at examples shows that both periods embraced not only “national culture” but also “foreign cultures” and encouraged cross-cultural exchange and multicultural representation. The presentation primarily focuses on the museums which have been showcasing both “Iranian art” and art from around the world (i.e. Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Jahan-Nama Museum of Niavaran Palace Historical Cultural Complex, World Art Museum). By comparing and contrasting these museums striving for “coexistence”, the talk further discusses what it means to define “national culture” within a global context and the continuities, changes, and challenges of identity formation in museum curation.

Biography
Yuki Terada is a Project Assistant Professor at Tokyo College, the University of Tokyo. Her research primarily focuses on how museums have been used to divide or integrate human groups and cultivate senses of belonging. She also examines how museums, which can change in accordance with the government in power, have functioned as a way to define, collect, and exhibit one’s own culture and the culture of others in Middle Eastern Islamic countries. Her doctoral dissertation, “Museum for Whom? The Evolution of the Museum and ‘Iranian Art’ in Iran” (2022) provided an overview of cultural policies and the history of museum establishment and discussed the role of museums in Iran as a stage for cultural diplomacy. Currently, she is conducting a research project titled “Museum of Science and Technology and the Paradox of Peace,” which examines how art, religion, science, and technology are displayed in contemporary Iranian museums and beyond.

Circulating Irano-Armenian Architects and the International Style in and out of Modern Iran

Abstract
In June 1928, twenty-eight architects, not all “Europeans” as claimed by canonical art history, were the guests of Swiss philanthropist Hélène de Mandrot in the Chateau de la Sarraz, where they drafted Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne’s (CIAM) manifesto. Gabriel Guevrekian, who had first introduced de Mandrot to Le Corbusier and led the organization of this seminal congress, was a vital player in the formation of the International Style whose Houses 67-68 figured at the center of Vienna’s Werkbund Exhibition in 1932. The following year, when the Nazis cracked down on the Modern Movement, Guevrekian—a Constantinople-born, Tehran-raised, Vienna-educated, and Paris-trained Armenian architect—accepted Reza Shah’s invitation to serve as Tehran’s chief architect. He and others, including Vartan Hovannisian and Nektar Papazian Andreeff, brought the International Style to the autocratic king’s tabula rasa. This talk asks why, given the staunchly nationalist policies of the 1920s-30s, did many of the modernist architects come from Iran’s religious minorities.
The diasporic global networks of Irano-Armenians since Shah Abbas’ deportations in the early 17th century, coupled with their commitment to the “international” doctrine of the Modern Movement and the International Style, rendered them influential agents in shaping Iranian as well as global modernism in architecture. This minoritarian agency of Irano-Armenian globality manifests itself as early as 1920, when Diana Abgar—a Rangoon-born, Calcutta-raised Armenian child of a Shirazi mother and a New Julfan father, was appointed as the First Republic of Armenia’s Honorary Consul to Japan, serving as one of the earliest female diplomats in the modern era. Challenging canonical art histories of the Modern Movement and nationalist histories of Area Studies, the study explores minoritized agencies in shaping and circulating the International Style.

Biography
Talinn Grigor is Professor of Art History in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on 18th- to 20th-century architectural and art histories through postcolonial, race, feminist, and critical theories grounded in Iran, Armeno-Iran, Armenia, and Parsi India. Her books include the winner of the Saidi-Sirjani Book Award, The Persian Revival (2021), Contemporary Iranian Art (2014), Building Iran (2009), and Persian Kingship and Architecture (2015) co-edited with Sussan Babaie. Grigor has received fellowships from the National Gallery of Art, Getty Research Institute, Cornell’s Humanities Center, Princeton’s Persian Center, MIT’s Aga Khan Program, SSRC, and Persian Heritage and Gulbenkian foundations. Co-authored with Houri Berberian, The Armenian Woman, Minoritarian Agency, and the Making of Iranian Modernity, 1860–1979, is forthcoming from Stanford University Press in March 2025. Grigor’s current book project explores Armenian architects’ unknown and global agency in the history of avant-gardism in West Asia.