When Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam entered the Faculty of Fine Arts in Tehran in 1944, he joined a generation of progressive artists leading the modernist movement within Iranian contemporary art and literature. The limited visual art scene at the time was largely dominated by the classical style of the master painter Kamal-al Molk (1848 -1940) and his disciples who closely emulated the classical, representational methods of European old masters while depicting local subject matters.

Vaziri Moghaddam quickly recognized the ongoing clash between traditional and modern tendencies prevailing in the art scene. He evaluated the teaching’ methods as indicative of a "transitional", showing the overall absence of ‘foundations’ in visual art.

Vaziri relocated to Italy, residing there from 1955 to 1963. His studies in Italy played a crucial and transformative role, giving the artist the platform to formulate his worldview and artistic vision based on the tenets of modernist art. The echoes of the ancient Persian tradition mixed with the new learnings from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome led him to the creation of his “Persian faces” series.

His teacher Franco Gentilini was highly impressed with this figurative series and organized Vaziri’s first solo exhibition at Galleria Portonovo (Rome) in the spring of 1957.