A week before she was murdered at her Rockville art studio, 45-year-old painter and art restorer Azin Naimi got a call from her brother, Mehrouz. He wanted to come visit, he said.
Azin was thrilled. The Iranian-born Naimi siblings had been close growing up, and it grieved Azin that she hadn’t seen her younger brother for five years.
“Do you think our mother will forgive me?” Mehrouz asked. He had been out of touch with their mother, Mary Bazargan, for 11 years.
“Call her,” Azin said.
Mehrouz had always idolized his beautiful and accomplished sister. She traveled the world appraising and restoring old masters art, and spoke English, French, Italian, Hindi and Polish in addition to their native Persian. He took her advice and phoned his mother in mid-July 2010 to say he had booked a flight from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., for the following Friday.
“Come sooner,” Bazargan urged him. “I’ll send you a ticket for Wednesday.”
Then they spent several “wonderful nights together,” Bazargan says over tea in her Rockville high-rise, a few blocks from the Old Georgetown Road apartment she shared with Azin.
By Sunday night, Azin was dead—stabbed, strangled, wrapped in a yellow blanket and dumped in an alley behind Farragut Street in Washington, D.C. Many who knew and loved her believe that in the months leading up to it, she somehow foresaw her own death.
When Azin was a child at boarding school in India, she realized that some of the children were being discriminated against and organized a student strike. “The principal called me to say, ‘She is a 7-year-old who reasons like a 40-year-old,’ ” Bazargan says.
Azin and Mehrouz had been sent out of Iran at ages 7 and 5 as unrest roiled their country. Then, in 1979, the Shah was overthrown. Bazargan and her husband parted after finding themselves on opposite political sides. She took the children to her mother in Silver Spring, settled her affairs in Tehran and never went back.
Azin and Mehrouz attended Montgomery County public schools and graduated from Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville. But the dislocation of their early life had affected them deeply. “We felt alone in the world,” Mehrouz says, “so we had to have each other’s backs.”
Like the architect-father they scarcely knew, both had an artistic bent. Mehrouz started a sign company in Rockville. Azin went to California and studied fine art at California State University, Northridge.
Drawn by their beauty and symbolism, she began studying and collecting Eastern Orthodox religious icons. In 1990 she opened the Icon Gallery in Reston, Va., with Piotr Gorski, a fellow collector and her eventual husband. After relocating to Alexandria, it became the largest antique icon gallery in the country, with a collection of rare, pre-revolutionary Russian icons as well as pieces from Poland, Greece and Romania dating back to the ninth century and valued at as much as $50,000 apiece.
Nancy Souza was an 18-year-old taking a year off before college when Azin hired her as an assistant. “We became almost like sisters—she was the kindest, most generous spirit,” recalls Souza, now 34 and a parole officer in Virginia. When Souza admired a $200 amber bracelet for sale in the gallery, Azin gave it to her. “She was the kind of person you never forget,” Souza says.
The Rev. George Rados of Saints Peter and Paul Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church in Potomac often visited the gallery. “I fell in love with an image of three healing saints,” he says. He purchased it and hired Azin to paint a crucifixion scene for the church. They had long conversations about iconography—Azin had vast technical knowledge of icons and was increasingly curious about the window onto the spiritual world they represented.
Unhappy in her marriage, she left her brother in charge of the gallery one day in 1994 and went for a drive to clear her head. On the George Washington Memorial Parkway, she lost control of her Nissan sports car and went over an embankment and into a tree. Though the car was totaled, she emerged unhurt and called Mehrouz, who rushed to the scene.
“When you saw the car, it was impossible to believe that anyone could have gotten out of it alive,” he says.
The ambulance crew urged her to go to the hospital and get treated for chemical burns from the air bag, but Azin asked to be taken to the gallery instead. There she took an icon of the Virgin Mary and disappeared into the back room.
Later she would tell of seeing a woman in white coming toward her before she hit the tree, telling her that she would survive the crash. “She was sure it was the Virgin Mary,” Bazargan says.
When Bazargan arrived at the gallery a few hours after the accident, she found Mehrouz, Azin and Gorski sitting in stunned silence. Bazargan says Azin’s chemical burns had already disappeared. “I didn’t know what to think,” she says, “because I didn’t believe in that kind of thing.”
Azin gave the icon to Rados as a gift and asked him to baptize her. “Through art, she found the Lord,” he says.
Soon after her baptism, Azin divorced and began studying old masters restoration techniques under noted National Gallery of Art restorer Gregory Stapko. In 1997 she moved back to Los Angeles, where she married James Parra, who worked in the music royalty business. They settled in the Miracle Mile District of L.A., and Azin opened the Old Masters Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. From Stapko, she had learned copying as well as restoration, and she painted reproductions of artworks for several celebrity clients.
Actress Laura Cerón, best known for her role as Nurse Marquez on the NBC-TV series ER, walked into the gallery hoping to commission a copy of a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe she remembered from her childhood parish church in Mexico.
“We had a strong, instant connection,” Cerón says by phone from her home in L.A. “It began with a love of art, but we also shared spirituality and laughter. Azin was beautiful and gregarious, but she also had this really strong faith, and you don’t meet many people like that in this town.”
Cerón ended up buying a painting of Adam and Eve rather than a commissioned work, but she continued to drop by the gallery in the evenings to sip wine and chat about art, life and love. “Azin had lived in so many different places, I always learned something from her,” Cerón says.
Parra says Azin “had a seemingly inexplicable ability to ‘feel’ the mood of the artist whose piece she was restoring.” He came home one time and found her in tears as she restored a portrait from the early 1900s. “I asked her what was wrong. …She smiled and said that while matching the brushstrokes of the artist she felt that the artist was sad,” he recalls. “Azin hadn’t even realized that she was crying. It was that ability to get into the mind of the artist that helped her bring an old painting back to its original beauty.”
Though their marriage ended after eight years, she and Parra remained friends.
Azin moved to London in 2007 and enrolled in Sotheby’s postgraduate program in fine and decorative arts. Her Queen’s Park studio and flat became a kind of salon, says Sergio Uribe, a fellow student from Mexico City who became a close friend. “She was a generous hostess, and a wonderful cook who made Persian dishes and taught me to belly dance,” he says, adding that she nicknamed him “Wiggles.”
They introduced each other to romantic Mexican and Persian pop music. Despite Azin’s extroversion, Uribe says, “I believe she was lonely, and longed for true love. Because of her religion, simply having a fling was out of the question.”
Sharply attuned to symbolism in art, she viewed real-life events as portentous. When she witnessed a fox killing a dove in her back garden, Uribe recalls, it struck her as a bad omen and haunted her for days.
From London, Azin moved to Lake Como, Italy, and found work on a large hotel art installation in nearby Switzerland. She also embarked on a promising romance. In November 2008 she wrote to her mother: “I climbed to the top of the mountain today. I love my life.” But that relationship ended, and early in 2009 she returned to the U.S. and moved in with Bazargan on Old Georgetown Road.
Friends noted a deepening religiosity in Azin. Although the Orthodox church permits alcohol, she stopped drinking and smoking. “She wanted to cleanse her body to attain a higher spiritual level,” Cerón says. “…She gave a lot of money to charity and really became an activist for her faith.”
Azin rented a studio at The Art Warehouse on Nebel Street in Rockville, a short walk from her mother’s apartment. Although she’d previously preferred copying and restoration to doing original work, she began painting four large canvases with Persian and religious subjects, including an arresting portrait of a young woman wearing a military helmet, painted during the anti-regime protests in Iran in the summer of 2009.
In addition to painting, Azin blogged about the situation in Iran and wrote mystical poetry, sometimes staying up half the night as she filled sheet after sheet. She embarked on a multivolume historical epic in iambic pentameter verse, illustrated with reproductions of visionaries such as Joan of Arc. Always trim and fashionable, she began dressing simply in black and white.
Every morning she prepared hot lunches for the homeless who congregated at the intersection of Old Georgetown Road and Rockville Pike. When Bazargan mentioned being allergic to her down comforter, Azin exclaimed, “That’s great!” and whisked the blanket down to the street to give to a homeless man. She gave $23,000 to refugees in Africa, her mother says.
By turns bewildered and moved, Bazargan would sometimes take her daughter’s hand and kiss it “as if she were a holy person.”
