within the era of modernism, it's interesting to look at some of those key artists, all of whom are iconic today. so we can look at someone like sirak melkonian — his work, "veiled woman", won the first prize of the very first tehran biennal in 1958. he has explored local idioms and nuances, and his portrayal on these flat washes of colour of a woman emerging from a bathhouse in downtown tehran, looking at you sideways, really exemplifies the kind of exploration that artists were interested in doing then. the incredible thing is that there is this misnomer in western art history that