Bahman Mohasses

Bahman Mohassess (, 1 March 1931 – 28 July 2010) was an Iranian painter, sculptor, translator, printmaker and theatre director. His oeuvre comprises paintings, sculptures, and collages. Known as "the irreverent" artist, Mohasses is said to have destroyed many of his own works, and those that become available at auction are now highly sought after. Mohassess is the most prominent artist who was openly gay in Iran, which is still stigmatized. He was the subject of the Mitra Farahani film documentary, Fifi Howls from Happiness. The Mohasses house consisted of approximately 15 families who were land owners of Lahijan and were in the trade of tea and silk and lived in the Pordsar neighborhood of Lahijan.

According to Hossein Mahjoobi, "All Mohasseses had strange personalities, but Bahman seemed to be the most complex and unique of them." In his autobiographical documentary Fifi Howls from Happiness, Mohasses mentions that he is descended from the Mongols on his father's side and the Qajars on his mother's side. He was a cousin of the celebrated Iranian illustrator and cartoonist, Ardeshir Mohasses, residing in New York.

At age 14, he learned painting by apprenticing with Seyyed Mohammed Habib Mohammedi, Through this period, he was part of an avant-garde artistic movement, which included his good friend Nima Yooshij, known as the 'father of modern Persian poetry'; along with Sohrab Sepehri, Houshang Irani and Gholamhossein Gharib, who were all considered progressive artists of their time.

In 1954 he moved to Italy to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma. He occasionally travelled to Iran and died in self-imposed seclusion in Rome in 2010.

Death and legacy Mohasses died on July 28, 2010, in Rome, Italy at the age of 79. "Irreverent and uncompromising, a gay man in a hostile world, Mohassess had a conflicted relationship with his homeland—revered by elites in the art scene and praised as a national icon, only to be censored later by an oppressive regime. Known for his iconoclastic art as well as his scathing declarations, Mohasses abandoned the country over 30 years ago for a simple, secluded life in Italy."

Mohasses, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not make references to Persian artistic traditions and had a modern outlook. His paintings and sculptures depicted mythical Minotaurs and creatures out of nightmares in vast deserts of hopelessness.

Personal life In 1977, he married Nezhat-al-Molook, the daughter of his father's cousin, who was a teacher in Bandar-e-Anzali and later became the head of the Teaching College for Women. She died of brain cancer around 1998.

Mohasses said he was proud of his homosexuality and lived it fully. The stigma associated with his homosexuality affected his reception in Iran, where his work was exhibited with those of Francis Bacon, another gay painter, only in 2017, albeit these works being in storage of Tehran museum for decades.

Filmography

The Eye That Hears (1967; Cheshmi ke mishenavad) Fifi Howls from Happiness (2013; Persian transliterated: Fifi az khoshhali zooze mikeshad)