Bahman Mohasses (March 10th, 1930 in Rasht – August 6th, 2010 in Rome) was a prominent Iranian painter, sculptor and translator. His Avant-garde paintings are considered as the most authentic artworks of modern Iranian painting. He was at top ten list of modern Iranian artists from the nineteenth to the present in The art Profession quarterly in April 2015.
Bahman Mohasses was born in 1930 in a Lahijani family in Rasht. The Mohass dynasty consisted of about 15 families who were the owners of Lahijan and worked in tea and silk trade and lived in Pardesar neighborhood of the city.
he traveled to Europe in 1954 and lived in Italy and studied art at the Academy of Art in Rome under the supervision of Ferruccio Frazzi for a while. The result of this was several group and solo exhibitions inside and outside of Italy and participation in exhibitions such as Venice Biennale, Sao Paulo and Paris.
Bahman Mohasses married to his father’s cousin’s daughter named “Nezhat-Al-Molok” in 1977 who was a teacher in Bandar Anzali and later the head of Girls’ Higher study institution in Tehran. They were supposed to get married earlier, but it was delayed due to his trips to Italy. Their relationship was mostly over the phone because he lived in Italy and his wife lived in Tehran. Nezhat-Al-Molok, who lived independently for herself, died due to a brain tumor in about 1996-1997.
Mohasses returned to Iran in 1963 hoping to establish a new movement in the art of his country and participated in numerous exhibitions, conferences and programs. Mohases translated works of Pirandello, Malaparte and Calvino from Italian and Eugene UNESCO and Jean Genet from French into Persian.
In 1969, he gave up his activities in Iran and returned to Rome and continued his life and work there. During this period, he received some orders to make sculptures in Tehran, but many of his public artworks were destroyed or damaged after the Islamic Revolution, and the artist himself destroyed the rest of his works in Iran. He sometimes traveled to Iran and finally passed away in self-imposed isolation in Rome in 2009. In addition to painting and sculpture, Mohases’s artistic career includes designs for books, such as the designs of the book “Orazan” written by Jalal. Al Ahmad.