More than 20,000 people flocked to an Iranian museum showing works by renowned Western artists, some for the first time – part of a treasure trove amassed before the Islamic Revolution.
The museum’s collection is said to be the largest collection of modern masterpieces outside of Europe and the United States, and includes multimillion-dollar pieces, many of which have been classified since the 1979 revolution.
Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art “always surprises me,” said visitor Shahin Rajabi, 35. “The current exhibition is no exception.”
The current exhibition “Minimalism and Conceptual Art” features 132 works by 34 world-renowned contemporary artists, said museum director Ebadreza Eslami, including Marcel Duchamp, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd and the duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
“The reception has been great,” Eslami said, especially after long closures in recent years due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
He said one of the main factors behind the attendance at this exhibition was that “38 masterpieces” were being exhibited “for the first time.”
AFP saw visitors at the museum this week, some pausing to study details while others were busy taking photos as they carefully toured the museum.
“I especially loved the last room in the exhibition where the artist had worked with the fluorescent light,” said visitor Rajabi, referring to American artist Dan Flavin’s work Untitled.
– ‘Very valuable’ –
The museum was inaugurated in 1977 during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was deposed by Islamic revolutionaries two years later.
Its design was inspired by Iran’s desert wind towers – an architectural element used to capture and circulate cool air in hot environments.
Most of the collection was built up by the Shah’s wife, former Queen Farah Pahlavi, who dispatched a team of experts to tour Western auctions and bid on prestigious paintings and sculptures to boost the country’s cultural profile.
The museum also has an important collection of Iranian modern and contemporary art.
But the international works went underground after the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini, railed against “Westoxification” and lamented the Western moral and sexual depravity he said had infected the Islamic world.
The themes of many Western works were considered too daring to be shown publicly and have spent much of the last few decades languishing in camps.
The museum has about 3,500 works, hundreds of which are “very valuable,” said public relations director Hassan Noferesti.
These include masterpieces by Western artists from Paul Gauguin to Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Alberto Giacometti, according to the Iranian Ministry of Culture.
– visitors twice –
The current exhibition, which runs until mid-September, includes a collage by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto entitled “Green Curtains” and an untitled hemp work by Canadian-American sculptor Jacqueline Winsor.
Curator Behrang Samadzadegan said that “about 20,000 people” have visited the exhibition since it opened in late June – about double the usual number.
Describing the show’s theme, he added, “When we talk about minimalism, we’re primarily talking about the environment, not the work.”
Standing in front of American artist Robert Smithson’s “Rock Salt & Mirror,” painter Solmaz Daneshvar, 28, said she “enjoyed the exhibition immensely.”
However, the exhibition was at the center of controversy this month when amateur video surfaced showing two silverfish beneath the frame of a rare image by the late German photographer duo Bernd and Hilla Becher.
The video, whose authenticity could not be independently verified by AFP, went viral.
The museum later issued a formal apology and assured concerned art lovers that the work of the Bechers, known for their photographs of industrial buildings, was not damaged.
It also closed its doors for two days due to fumigation.
In 2015, the museum hosted an exhibition of 42 works by Western artists, including Pollock’s masterpiece, Mural on Indian Red Ground, which was valued at $250 million by the experts at Christie’s auction house in 2010.
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