ARDESHIR MOHASSESS (1938–2008)

Ardeshir Mohassess, an Iranian artist long a resident in America, who pushed the art of the cartoon to almost surrealist satire of his native land, died on October 9 in Manhattan, according to Douglas Martin in the New York Times. Mohassess was a caricaturist often compared to Saul Steinberg for the bite and style of his cartoons, but he also drew inspiration from masters like Daumier and Picasso, as well as from Iranian religious art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The cartoonist himself insisted he was most of all a reporter, said Nicky Nodjoumi, friend and artist. His reportage was directed at the most disquieting elements he saw in Iran’s identity—selfishness, tyranny, hypocrisy, and injustice, not to mention gluttony and verbosity—and found first expression in the popular press. It later appeared in about a dozen books, many gallery shows, and magazines and newspapers in Iran, the United States, and Europe. Mohasses lived in exile, having fled to New York in 1976 after Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1941 to 1979, took exception to his work. Stanley Mason wrote in the international design magazine Graphis, “There is not much laughter in his cartoons, and where it can be heard it is hard and dry as a bone.”