Manoucher Yektai

Yektai was born in 1921 in Tehran, Iran. He began his art education in the Fine Arts Faculty of the University of Tehran but left without completing a degree. Accounts vary on the exact sequence of his subsequent training: sources describe study at the Art Students League in New York, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in the atelier of the Cubist painter Andre Lhote following an introduction from Amedee Ozenfant, all in the mid to late 1940s.

In New York, Yektai developed a heavily impastoed style of still life, portraiture, and color-field abstraction, and he also wrote poetry throughout his career. In 1950 he held a solo exhibition at Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York, described by the artist's estate as the first time an Iranian-born artist had a show outside Iran. He exhibited regularly through Poindexter Gallery in New York from 1957 to 1965, a period that cemented his standing within the New York School.

Yektai died in 2019. Sources agree on the year but not on the exact date or place: the artist's estate and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, cite Sagaponack, New York, while Karma and other sources cite New York City. No available source gives a specific day or month of death. He was approximately 97 or 98 at the time of his death, depending on the exact, undocumented month and day of his birth.

Yektai's early critical recognition began with his 1950 solo exhibition at Grace Borgenicht Gallery in New York, which the artist's estate describes as the first time an Iranian-born artist had a show outside Iran. His subsequent work through the 1950s and 1960s, including a long run of exhibitions at Poindexter Gallery, kept him active among the working painters of the New York School. Recent institutional framing, notably at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, positions him as a founding member of the New York School whose Persian background and impasto still lifes and portraits offer a distinct, transnational account of postwar American abstraction, though broader surveys of Abstract Expressionism have often omitted him, and critics describe his standing as undergoing a long overdue reassessment.

Yektai's best-documented auction result is Portrait of Iris Clert (1960), which sold for USD 279,525 at auction in 2015; the exact calendar date and auction house for that sale are not confirmed in available sources. A more recent result, Sans titre (1961), sold through Christie's online 20th/21st Century Art sale on December 10, 2024, for USD 225,900, below the 2015 figure. One market database reports a higher realized price for a Yektai painting, up to USD 1,282,748, but without a confirmable work title, sale date, or auction house, so it is not treated here as the established record. Public sale data for Yektai remains sparse, consistent with an artist whose market has been driven more by museum and gallery attention than by frequent auction turnover. Since his death, Karma in New York and Los Angeles and Mennour in Paris have organized the major posthumous exhibitions of his work, including a 2025 survey of his early paintings and a 2026 solo museum show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.

Documented auction results for Yektai are limited, and the two highest confirmed prices, from 2015 and 2024, sit well apart in both time and value, which means any single sale should be read with caution rather than as a stable trend line. No published catalogue raisonne exists, though a digital catalogue raisonne is reported to be in progress through the estate, so provenance and authenticity generally run through the artist's estate and its principal exhibiting galleries, Karma and Mennour. The recent run of museum attention, culminating in the 2026 Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami survey, is the strongest signal of renewed interest in his work, but it has not yet been matched by a correspondingly deep or frequent auction record.