After a long battle with cancer, veteran Iranian painter, art critic and translator, Hannibal Alkhas has passed away at the age of 80 in the US.
The Assyrian artist, known as the forerunner of Figurative painting in Iran, died in California on Sept. 14, 2010.
Alkhas who was born and raised in the western Iranian city of Kermanshah, moved to the US in 1951 and studied philosophy for three years at Loyola University of Chicago, Illinois.
He continued his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago where he earned his Bachelor and Master's degrees in Fine Art.
Alkhas returned to Iran in 1959 and established Gilgamesh Gallery, the country's first modern art gallery.
He taught art at the Illinois Monticello Collage, Tehran University, Assyrian Civic Club of Turluck, the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles and Iran's Azad University.
His work is deeply inspired by the ancient bas-reliefs and stone sculptures of ancient Assyria, Babylon and Daric-Persia.
Alkhas has held numerous domestic and international exhibitions and a number of his paintings hang in the Museum of Fine Arts and the Gallery of Modern Arts in Tehran.
Human emotions such as love and hate, the exotic and the mundane, victory and defeat, hope and despair, pride and weakness are the subjects he shows in his works mixing them with universal notions of birth, death, hunger, war and peace.
Alkhas has also created book illustrations, written poems and translated many poems to and from Assyrian. His works have been displayed in numerous exhibitions in Iran, Europe, Canada, Australia and the US.
TEHRAN, Sept. 15 (MNA) — Iranian master sculptor and painter Hannibal Alkhas died on September 14 in the United States at the age of 80. He was suffering from a form of cancer.
Alkhas traveled to Iran in June to attend his 80th birthday celebration that his students had arranged for him at the Iranian Artists Forum where a series of his works also went on show.
He was planning to stay in Iran until the end of the year but was forced to return to the United States for medical treatment.
His body will be buried in the United States on Thursday, but a funeral ceremony is arranged here in Tehran on Thursday at the Catholic Church located on Forsat St. and Enqelab Ave., his brother-in-law Albert Gabriel told the Persian service of MNA on Wednesday.
The son of Assyrian writer Rabi Adai Alkhas, Hannibal was born in 1930 in Kermanshah, Iran. He moved to the United States in 1951 where he attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1953 to 1959 and earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in fine art. He taught at different campuses of the Islamic Azad University in Iran.
Hannibal Alkhas was working on the completion of his Assyrian reproduction of the tragedy of Rustam and Sohrab, which was to have a happy ending.
“When I read the combat of Rustam and Sohrab in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, I wept for Sohrab (Rustam’s only son) who was killed by his father. So I decided to bring the story to a different end,” he had told MNA in June.
He had also explained that he changed the plot in a way that when Rustam takes the knife to stab Sohrab, he feels the great power of Sohrab and realizes that he is his son and does not kill him. Thereafter, father and son become close friends and decide to help people. The story continues on to the modern world of today where they even travel to the United States to save the American Indians.
Painter and sculptor Alkhas had also illustrated tens of book covers. His translation of Hafez’s lyrics into Assyrian was also among his other credits.
Assyria
\ã-'sir-é-ä\ n (1998)
1: an ancient empire of Ashur
2: a democratic state in Bet-Nahren, Assyria (northern
Iraq, northwestern Iran, southeastern Turkey and eastern Syria.)
3:
a democratic state that fosters the social and political rights to all of
its inhabitants irrespective of their religion, race, or gender
4: a democratic state that believes in the freedom of
religion, conscience, language, education and culture in faithfulness to the
principles of the United Nations Charter —
Atour synonym
Ethnicity, Religion, Language
»
Israeli, Jewish, Hebrew
»
Assyrian, Christian, Aramaic
»
Saudi Arabian, Muslim, Arabic
Assyrian
\ã-'sir-é-an\ adj or n (1998)
1: descendants of the ancient empire of Ashur
2: the Assyrians, although representing but one single
nation as the direct heirs of the ancient Assyrian Empire, are now
doctrinally divided, inter sese, into five principle
ecclesiastically designated religious sects with their corresponding
hierarchies and distinct church governments, namely, Church of the
East, Chaldean, Maronite, Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholic.
These formal divisions had their origin in the 5th century of the
Christian Era. No one can coherently understand the Assyrians
as a whole until he can distinguish that which is religion or church
from that which is nation -- a matter which is particularly
difficult for the people from the western world to understand; for
in the East, by force of circumstances beyond their control,
religion has been made, from time immemorial, virtually into a
criterion of nationality.
3:
the Assyrians have been referred to as Aramaean, Aramaye, Ashuraya,
Ashureen, Ashuri, Ashuroyo, Assyrio-Chaldean, Aturaya, Chaldean,
Chaldo, ChaldoAssyrian, ChaldoAssyrio, Jacobite, Kaldany, Kaldu,
Kasdu, Malabar, Maronite, Maronaya, Nestorian, Nestornaye, Oromoye,
Suraya, Syriac, Syrian, Syriani, Suryoye, Suryoyo and Telkeffee. —
Assyrianism verb
Aramaic
\ar-é-'máik\
n (1998)
1: a Semitic language which became the lingua franca of
the Middle East during the ancient Assyrian empire.
2: has been referred to as Neo-Aramaic, Neo-Syriac, Classical
Syriac, Syriac, Suryoyo, Swadaya and Turoyo.
, Nov-22-2010 at 06:49 AM, (3)