Displaying items by tag: Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art

Fourteen pieces of American art purchased by Iran nearly four decades ago, but blocked for export from the United States because of the 1979 Iranian revolution and rupture in relations, have finally been delivered, both nations said Friday.

Delivery of the art, described by American officials as architectural drawings bought in 1978 by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, came against the backdrop of a slightly improved atmosphere in the estranged ties between Iran and the United States since the agreement resolving Iran’s disputed nuclear work was reached in July.

It’s a collection that includes artworks by Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Roy Lichtenstein, Jackson Pollock, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, René Magritte, and many others. It has been valued at approximately $3 billion. And since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran most of it has been in storage. That’s about to change.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is set to put on a stunning exhibition filled with Western works acquired by Iran’s former Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi, many of which have not been so boldly displayed since she and her late husband, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, were deposed in the revolution that severed relations between Iran and much of the West. Under the empress’s direction, Iran purchased the works at a time when the global art market was depressed and Iran’s coffers were full of oil revenue.

Iran is starting to use its soft power, agreeing last month to lend works from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s (TMoCA) collection of international and Iranian art for an exhibition in Berlin next year. The show, a symbol of Iran’s rapprochement with the West, could travel beyond Berlin, a spokeswoman for the Tehran museum tells us. The exhibition will include works by international and Iranian artists.

Other leading museums have expressed an interest in borrowing from the Tehran collection, which includes works by Picasso, Rothko, Pollock and Bacon among others.

A billion pound collection of modern masterpieces which has languished in a storeroom bunker under Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran may finally see the light of day, under changes in the new government's policy. Paintings by Picasso, Miro, Calder, Bacon, Pollock, Warhol, Lichtenstein, Van Gogh and Monet have languished in a storeroom beneath the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art since the  Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The collection was put together in the 1960s and 1970s by Queen Farah Pahlavi, the wife of the last shah of Iran. Fearing that they would be destroyed by the religious turmoil that gripped the the country, the works were carefully packed up, crated and removed from public view.

It is the finest collection of modern art anywhere outside Europe and the US, boasting works by Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Edvard Munch, René Magritte and Mark Rothko.

But the pieces have been stacked in the basement of Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art for more than 30 years, gathering dust in storage. Censors in Iran classed some as un-Islamic, pornographic or too gay, and they have never been shown in public. Others have been displayed only once or twice.

But now a number of the collection's paintings are on show for the first time in Tehran as part of the museum's Pop Art & Op Art exhibition, featuring works by Warhol, David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Victor Vasarely, Richard Hamilton and Jasper Johns.

"Many of the works in the exhibition are shown for the first time," Hasan Noferesti, the museum's director for art programmes, told the Mehr news agency. "The exhibition aims to show the evolution of these artistic movements."

More than 100 pieces from the museum's remarkable collection are on display, according to Mehr, along with a series of works from Mexico that have been dedicated to the museum in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Mexican revolution and the 200th anniversary of the country's independence.

James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Larry Rivers and RB Kitaj are among other artists whose works are in the exhibition, which runs until mid-August.

Iran's unique hidden treasure was bought before the Islamic revolution, under the supervision of Farah Pahlavi, the former queen of Iran, who fled the country with the late shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

The 38-year reign of the shah, self-proclaimed kings of kings, came to an end after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile to Tehran receiving a hero's welcome and founded the Islamic republic.

The collection includes Pollock's Mural on Indian Red Ground, considered to be one of his most important works and estimated to be worth more than $250m, as well as important pieces by Picasso, Van Gogh, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Whistler and Marcel Duchamp.

There are even pieces by artists whom the former empress met in person, including the Russian-French painter Marc Chagall and the English sculptor Henry Moore. The collection is thought to be worth more than $2.5bn.