PARVIZ TANAVOLI recalls that, as a teenager, he signed up for the first modern sculpture class ever offered in his native Iran. The year was 1952, and the course was almost canceled—not just because Tanavoli was its only student, but because there was no one to teach it. Iran’s nascent modern art scene had no sculptors to speak of, and art training was strictly academic. A European-trained painter was eventually found to run the course, but Iranian arts pedagogy would remain old-fashioned; Tanavoli’s senior-year project was completed under the stern eye of a colonel whose own practice