Iran Puts Rarely-seen Western Art on Display

Paul Hughes, Reuters:

Iran has put on display for the first time what art experts say is the most important collection of modern Western art outside Europe and the United States.

Spanning the 1870s to the late 1980s and boasting works by artists including Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock, the "Modern Art Movement" exhibition contains some paintings not shown since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. READ MORE

"This is the first time we have ever displayed the collection together," Alireza Samiazar, director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, told Reuters.

"It's a sensational show for all of us and, considering the political situation, it could be quite a controversial show as well," he said.

Religious conservatives, led by new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have swept reform-minded politicians out of power in elections over the last three years, raising fears that a tentative liberalisation in the arts will soon be reversed.

The museum's highly-valuable collection of Western art, which numbers around 150 paintings, was largely amassed during the 1970s by Farah Pahlavi, wife of the late Shah of Iran.

The works by artists such as Rene Magrite, Vincent Van Gogh, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali and others were briefly put on display when the museum opened in 1978.

But the Shah's fall in 1979 saw most of them locked away in a vault by Iran's new Islamic leaders who were opposed to Western cultural influence and "immoral" art.

For more than 20 years most of the collection never saw the light of day.

SOME STILL UNDER COVER

Gradually, under Samiazar's stewardship and with the backing of former President Mohammad Khatami -- a reformist cleric who favoured greater cultural and artistic tolerance -- many of them were brought out for display.

But never before had the whole collection been shown at once.

Even now, three of the works, including an Auguste Renoir portrait of a semi-nude girl considered by some experts to be among the finest in the collection, were not included to avoid offending religious hardliners.

Still, the exhibition, which began this week and is scheduled to run for seven weeks, was described as "surely one of the great surprises of the international museum world," by British art expert Edward Lucie-Smith.

"This is clearly the most important collection of the art of this period outside of Western Europe and North America," he said in a commentary on the museum web site.

The exhibition marks another bold move by the museum which last year hosted a British sculpture exhibition featuring works by Damien Hirst and Henry Moore and this year loaned a Francis Bacon painting to the UK which had been locked away since the revolution.

But, Samiazar said, with the recent change in government in Tehran, it would probably be his last act in charge of the museum.

"I don't think they want me to stay and if they wanted me to I don't think I would," he said.