Art: Back to Persia

Persisting in its efforts to trace the origins of modern French painting, Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art last week called in the assistance of the American Institute for Persian Art & Archaeology. Between them they presented potent evidence in an exhibit of reproductions of 17th Century Persian frescoes which one Sarkis Katchadourian has spent two years laboriously copying in gouache on paper, reproductions which mimic exactly the patches of new plaster, the splatter of the original frescoer’s brush. As in Paris, where the reproductions were first exhibited, critics were amused to note that painters apparently copied Marie Laurencin and Henri Matisse in the 17th Century. It seemed likely that the Institute for Persian Art & Archaeology which last winter started a Persian vogue among London dressmakers, decorators, was about to do the same thing for the U. S.