Abolghassem Saidi

Abolghassem Saidi was born on 15 August 1926 in Arak, Iran, though a small number of recent sources place his birth year in 1925; the day and month are consistent across accounts. He moved to Paris in 1950 and enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts around 1951, completing his studies in 1955 or 1956, and has lived and worked primarily in Paris since settling there in the mid-1950s.

Saidi exhibited regularly at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture in Paris from 1954 to 1966, winning the salon's prize in 1959 for a work known as The Young Widow. He went on to win an award at the Second Tehran Painting Biennial in 1960 and the Grand Prize at the Fifth Tehran Biennale in 1966, and later received a prize in Monte Carlo in 1993. Between 1967 and 1977 he worked in Iran in connection with the Festival of Shiraz before traveling to the United States. His work entered institutional holdings in Iran and Europe, including the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the University of Shiraz, and the corporate collection of Saderat Bank in London.

Saidi held his first solo exhibition in his home country only in 2015, at Shahrivar Gallery in Tehran, showing around thirty works. His paintings were included in Iran Modern at the Asia Society Museum in New York in 2013 and in Modern Iran and the Avant-Gardes, 1948 to 1978 at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2024 and 2025. Press coverage marking what was described as his 100th birthday appeared in August 2025, describing him as still living and working in Paris. No death has been reported in any source reviewed, and he is treated as a living artist as of this writing.

Saidi is generally described in the available literature as one of the prominent figures of the second generation of Iranian modernists, a characterization repeated across artist databases and exhibition materials. Commentary on his work, most of it unsigned editorial writing rather than attributed criticism, consistently emphasizes his treatment of trees and still lifes as vehicles for stability and calm rather than narrative content. No verbatim quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in the available sources, so none is reproduced here.

Saidi's secondary market is thin and only partly documented in public sources. His first recorded auction appearance was at Christie's in November 2007, though the specific lot and price from that sale are not documented. The highest price attributed to him in available market databases is USD 148,000 (reported as IRR 74,000,000,000) for an untitled work, per ArtChart, but the auction house, sale location, and exact date for that result are not specified in any source found. A separate, verifiable sale places a 1958 still life at a hammer price of USD 5,000 at Trinity International Auctions and Appraisals. Given the gaps in the public record, any single price point should be read as an indication of range rather than a confirmed benchmark.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Saidi and no confirmed gallery or estate representation as of 2026, so provenance and auction house documentation carry unusual weight in verifying any individual work. His name also appears across sources in several transliterated spellings, including Saidi, Saïdi, Saeedi, and Saiedi, which can fragment search results and price records if not accounted for. Public auction data is limited and the top reported price lacks a documented sale house and date, so collectors should treat any single high-price claim with caution until it can be traced to a primary auction record.