Mounir Farmanfarmaian Talks Art

NEW YORK — Above the buzz of tool-wielding contractors installing two floors’ worth of her artwork at the Guggenheim Museum on Monday morning, even Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian had to ask, “Did I do that all?” An understandable reaction considering the 91-year-old was taking in her first major U.S. museum show. When her “Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings, 1974-2014” exhibition bows Wednesday, museumgoers will get a kaleidoscopic look at one of the more involved, yet untold stories in the modern art world. When the outbreak of World War II derailed Farmanfarmaian’s plans to study in Paris, the artist wound up in New York — a decision by default that turned out to be a formative one. After studying at Parsons School of Design and Cornell University, she later worked as a Bonwit Teller fashion illustrator with her picnic-loving pal Andy Warhol and became ensconced in the influential New York art world of the Fifties and Seventies. Immersed in the Greenwich Village scene, she befriended Frank Stella, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Alexander Calder and Milton Avery. After marrying Abol Bashar Farmanfarmaian, an international lawyer and investor, and returning to Iran in 1957, she experimented with reverse-glass painting, mirror mosaics and

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