by 
Azadeh Salehi’s interview with Sadegh Tabrizi (calligraphic painting artist), titled “Today’s Artists Have No Fear of Imitation”, Vatan Emrooz newspaper, Sunday, 11 January 2009
Vatan Emrooz newspaper’s interview with Sadegh Tabrizi, titled “Today’s Artists Have No Fear of Imitation,” was published in its entirety in the aforementioned newspaper, and in this section only Mr. Tabrizi’s remarks regarding Ziapour have been written. To read the full interview, you may refer to the source cited at the end of this text.
The 1950s marked the beginning of modern art in Iran, and artists such as Jalil Ziapour, Mahmoud Javadipour, Ahmad Esfandiari, Javad Hamidi, and others produced works in this decade that were considered innovative but lacked the desired cohesion. Perhaps this was because they were influenced by Western art, and an Iranian identity was less visible in them. Although these artists strove to depict paintings that showed a man with a chibouk in hand, a turquoise dome, an imamzadeh, and so on, these works failed to be as innovative as they should have been and were somewhat commonplace. Of course, amidst this, Jalil Ziapour tried to convey Iranian subjects in the various configurations of patterned tiles, which he also succeeded in doing; but the point is that the critics of that time mistakenly regarded Ziapour’s work as the Cubist style, whereas this was not the case, and Cubism had a different philosophy and fundamentally had no relation to Ziapour’s work.
Source: Vatan Emrooz newspaper
