14 Facts About Jalil Ziapour

Jalil Ziapour was an Iranian painter, academician, researcher, and writer.

Jalil Ziapour is considered to be the "father of modern Iranian painting".

Jalil Ziapour was one of the founders of the Fighting Cock Society, an arts association.

Jalil Ziapour was born in 1920 in Bandar-e Anzali, Qajar Iran.

The first period of the school announced three graduates in painting and Jalil Ziapour received the first place and the first class cultural medal from the school and headed to France by the scholarship presented by that country's government and continued studying in Ecole nationale superieure des Beaux-Arts in visual arts field.

In 1949, Jalil Ziapour established the artistic board "Fighting Cock", which was a leading committee in the field of modern arts in literature, theater, music and painting, and started printing a magazine with the same name with his proponents and presented his theory about visual arts called "Refute of the Theories of Past and Contemporary Ideologies -from Primitive to Surrealism".

Jalil Ziapour contended in four fronts: the followers of past methods, the degenerate modernists who had returned from abroad, the mass traditionalists, the followers of the old European method.

Jalil Ziapour's effort was to preserve the Iranian identity by leaning on the capacity of native culture, but speak by a global tongue and present it and eventually bring honor to his Iranian culture.

In 1951, Jalil Ziapour founded the School of Decorative Arts for Boys in Tehran.

At 79 years of age, Jalil Ziapour died at the Tus hospital of Tehran on Tuesday, 21 December 1999, as a result of heart failure after spending a difficult period of disease, and two days later on December 23, he was buried at the artists section of Behesht-e Zahra.

Jalil Ziapour announced the goal of the Fighting Cock Society "Contending Conservatism and Traditionalism far from the Realities of the Time".

Jalil Ziapour presented his art theory and view as a thesis titled "Refute of the Theories of Past and Contemporary Ideologies from Primitive to Surrealism" in October 1948 to cultural and journal societies; and in it, after presenting a short history of Occidental art ideologies, he considered all those ideologies ineffective for the main goal of painting and stated most of them as covers for supplying things other than painting.

Jalil Ziapour's works are famous because of possessing original Iranian concepts, simplification of figures, loyalty to the traditional levels along with geometric lines of cubism, awareness of composition and generally the special style of painting.

Jalil Ziapour saw their behaviors, customs and traditions, clothes and adornments worth noticing and utilized those resources in his works and because of his research inclination toward farming lifestyle, nomadic concepts appeared in his works in an allegorical way.