Iran s 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 could see from the palace. And I think of the streams, the trees, ordinary people…” She sighs. “Of course, I miss my country, the country that I knew. But I keep hope that Iran will rise from her ashes.”
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.