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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 occasions before on these pages to argue why cliche East vs West binaries need to yield to concepti...

Donna Stein's 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 collection of Modern Western art outside Europe and North America—swung open its doors again on ...

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

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. ...

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 ...