A Reading of Coffee House Painting and Murals of Isfahan School Based on the Concept of Conversation in Gadamer's Modern Hermeneutic Theory

With the beginning of the constitutional movement and social changes, a new chapter in the history of Iranian painting was opened. The history of Iran after constitutionalism was full of conflicts between tradition and modernity, and the idea of modernity that came to Iran was not properly understood. In fact, the growing movement towards Western art prevented Iranian art from moving naturally in accordance with its internal conditions. In the meantime, coffee house painting and interesting spectacular curtains created by street and mall artists and anonymous ones, are the full picture of the taste, thought and art of their creators, which depict the beliefs and customs of the time. Given the high status of coffee house painting as a folk art in the constitutional period and its comparative and intertextual nature with traditional and modern art, the concept of conversation in Gadamer's thought, as an epistemological approach, can open a new window of consciousness and knowledge to recognize such paintings in front of the audience and to analyze and retrieve them. Qajar painting has a special place in the history of Iranian art, and in the meantime, coffee house paintings are significant as a prominent branch of the art forms of painting of the constitutional era in this period. During the constitutional period, according to the socio-cultural conditions and the idea of modernism and the reflection of Western culture and art, coffee house painting refers to traditional painting in order to revive Iranian-Islamic identity and culture. Coffee house painters are as the most significant contemporary painters of this period of time. The present study answers the question; to what extent is it possible to interpret and understand the works of painters of this period with the concept of conversation in Gadamer's modern hermeneutic theory? and to what extent can this concept help to identify, trace the elements, and how the coffee house painting was formed? The purpose of this study is to describe and read the works of coffee house paintings and Isfahan school murals in the contemporary era using the concept of conversation in Gadamer's theory of hermeneutics. This research has been done with a descriptive-analytical approach based on the intellectual thought of the time and the collection of research resources is in a documentary and library way. The results show that the concept of conversation in Gadamer's thought is a great help to better describe how to create coffee house paintings according to the needs of the audience. The artist has created her work by referring to and conversing with the mural of the Isfahan school in connection with the intellectual-artistic horizon of the constitutional era, which is influenced by the all-encompassing prevalence of Western art elements. Among these, elements such as time, place, audience, themes and popular usage of painting and recitation and quotation of narrators, as another side of the conversation, are important in the formation of coffee house painting.
The concept of conversation combined with concepts such as social and cultural context (semantic horizon), and Gadamer's language and tradition, plays an important role in shaping the works of coffee house painters. Contemporary painting was the beginning of the revival of Iranian identity and culture, in line with the influences that had reached Iran from Western art (social and cultural context of the artist's time). Although the elements and motifs of their works are from the past, it was a new experience for a group of Iranian artists to talk to them in their contemporary language by transferring the traditions to the present, because they had a common language with them, which had its place in the heart of Iranian traditions and culture. Since the audience of these paintings was ordinary people, the artist, one of the favorite subjects of the people, and with a suitable public style, painted in his own way in line with the traditional painting style of Isfahan school as an important step to satisfy the tastes and interests of his community. Signs derived from the drawings of the Isfahan school in coffee house painting include such things as balance and movement in visual elements and colors, the type of ideal portrait painting and the display of existential existence in the figures of pure human beings and individualistic faces with characteristics. Earth in the faces of low-level people, animal-like form, diffused and uniform light on the screen, realism in the type of cover of the figures, the importance of linear design and image resolution and simultaneous display of various events, and so on are evident as well. Coffee house painters have dealt with these traditions with prejudices that pertain to the semantic horizon of their time, but on the contrary, they also gave the right to retell their words as a party to the conversation, so that the process of understanding or forming art work is achieved.