Manoucher Yektai is an Iranian American artist who belongs to the school of New York School Abstract Expressionist.
Yektai became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1959.
"The metaphysical absolutism that attracted what Rosenberg called the theological branch of Abstract-Expressionism did not attract him. His natural approach combined the celebration of the beautiful with something of the painting-of-everyday-life approach. Far from seeing himself as a destroyer of beauty, Yektai believes in the dignity of human life and celebrates the beauty of the forms it transpires among. In discussing Yektai's work of the early 19 50S John Ashbery contrasted its" opulent sobriety" with the "heroicism" of such as Pollock.4 Yektai himself never thought that he was an Abstract- Expressionist, though when Castelli brought some of his painters to the Borgenicht show in 1951 they immediately affirmed him as such, and so did the critics: a reviewer in Arts magazine in 1957, for example, wrote: "Yektai is in the Abstract Expressionist school, not as an undergraduate, but as a member of the faculty."5 In fact, Yektai himself always knew that, as he says, "I was a figurative painter." It was his insistence on the value of figuration that pointed to the underlying philosophical difference. He was not seeking the sublime to the exclusion of the beautiful; Malevich's desert of pure feeling beyond form did not seem to him an attractive residence.
In his insistence on at least residual figuration in even his most abstract works, Yektai retained awareness of what deKooning referred to when he said, about the origin of abstraction: "One day some painter used 'Abstraction' as a title for one of his paintings. It was a still life. And it was a very tricky title."6 For Yektai also it was obvious that gestural abstraction was rising out of the still life in a lineage that went back to Cezanne, and he did not wish to disguise this fact in his work. Yet in his paint-handling and his feelings toward painting as a medium he definitely shared a lot with the mainstream Abstract-Expressionists. ."(yektai.com)
