Collection: Asadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani

Asadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani (born 1931) is an Iranian art historian specialising in the arts of the Islamic world and South Asia, with particular expertise in Persian metalwork, manuscript painting and the visual culture of the Persianate world. He was a researcher at the CNRS in Paris and later at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art.

His contribution to Art Tantrique at Le Point Cardinal, Paris, in 1970 supplied a necessary corrective to the countercultural reception of tantric imagery: tantric geometry was not simply abstraction ahead of its time. Its forms followed a canon and carried meanings understood by initiates — very different from the individual autonomy claimed by European abstraction. That argument, made at the moment Neo-Tantra was beginning to emerge in India, shaped how the exhibition was understood.

The printed matter gathered here documents his presence in the exhibition record.