Page 2 - Donna Stein News Today

The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected, and Rediscovered Modern Art, by Donna Stein, 78, details her time working for Irans Farah Pahlavi.

An exiled Empress, a score-settling curator, and $3 billion worth of modern art - need we say more?

Read an excerpt from Donna Stein's new memoir, "The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art."

“Today, even if some Iranians don’t like modern art, they know it’s valuable.”

The story of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) has been irresistible to journalists for four decades, laden as it is with period glamour, political intrigue and eye-catching art. To briefly recap: in the mid-1970s, the third wife of the Shah of Iran, Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi, was patron of a crash museum-building programme. Surging oil prices had made Iran’s ruling classes rich, and Western economies, and therefore the art market, weak. In October 1977, TMoCA opened for Pahlavi’s ...

It makes no difference if you are reading about the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in the New York Times, the BBC or any other Western media organisation - the subtext is always how surprising it is to find Western art in the East and especially in a widely and vastly alienated country like Iran, writes Dabashi [Wikimedia commons] Where do priceless works of art belong – where they were created, where they were plundered or where they were eventually sold and museumised?  I have had occas...

Donna Steins The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected, and Rediscovered Modern Art (2021). Courtesy of Skira. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) has for decades been a beacon for the Iranian people. During the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a human shield formed around the building to protect the art inside. In 2016, when plans to privatize the museum were made public, protests filled the street.  After two years of renovations, TMoCA—which houses the most valuable...

A selection of recent visual books of interest; plus, a peek at what our colleagues around the newsroom are reading.

Irans secret billion-dollar art collection How did the most valuable collection of modern western art outside Europe and the US end up in Tehran? 5 April 2021 • 5:00am The Tehran Museum Of Contemporary Art  Credit: Alamy People ask me, ‘What do you think of when you think of Iran?’” says Farah Pahlavi, the 82-year-old widow of the country’s last Shah, speaking to me via Zoom from her wood-panelled Parisian home. “I think of the mountains. Especially Damavand, the volcano, which I ...

Thursday, 1 April, 2021 - 07:30 Farah Diba Pahlavi, left, and Donna Stein discussing a Hans Bellmer photograph during the museum’s installation of “Creative Photography: An Historical Survey,” October 1977.Credit...Jila Dejam, via Donna Stein Elaine Sciolino On the edge of a vast park in Tehran sits a Neo-Brutalist structure the color of sand. Inside is one of the finest collections of modern Western art in the world. You e...