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 enter the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art through an atrium that spirals downward like an inverted version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Photos of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s 1979 Revolution, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded him as the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, glare down at you.