“Iran Modern”
Asia Society and Museum
THE STORY OF MODERNISM is about a time but it is also about a place; even today, curators and art historians struggle to draw an adequate map of the global flows of modernity. “Iran Modern,” on view at the Asia Society, (through January 5) poses one such cartography, charting the distinctive and heterogeneous visual expressions that flourished in Iran during the postwar years.
The show’s temporal frame falls between the 1953 CIA coup that ousted Iran’s democratically elected government and the 1979 revolution that overthrew the last shah. In the intervening decades, the country became a case