Tehran’s Hidden Vault of Western Art

Travel Blog • Joanna Kakissis • 09.25.07 | 9:53 AM ET

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad—who made such a, uh, splash at Columbia University yesterday—may hate the West, but his country owns one of the most massive collections of 19th- and 20th-century Western art outside the West, according to a fascinating story by Kim Murphy in the Los Angele Times. The works—which include Picassos, Kandinskys, Miros, Warhols and possibly the best Jackson Pollock collection outside the United States—are relegated to the basement of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Amazingly, they have rarely been seen over the past 30 years.

“Assembled during the waning years of the Shah’s regime, when the oil boom of the 1970s rendered the country flush with cash, the collection debuted two years before the Islamic Revolution,” Murphy writes. “Except for occasional international loans, a pair of small-scale shows and a daring exhibition two years ago during the administration of reform-minded President Mohammad Khatami, it disappeared from view thereafter.”

The museum’s director, Habibollah Sadeghi—clearly irritated at Murphy’s insistence on viewing the paintings—insists that a lack of exhibition space, not an overexertion of political control, has kept the paintings out of the public’s view.

She writes:

At some point, it seems we have chewed through our mutual suspicion. We walk down a long hallway, wait at the door of a large freight elevator, and descend into the bowels of the museum. Half a dozen caretakers usher us into a low-ceilinged room with open metal beams and exposed insulation, where hundreds of paintings hang on rolling racks, stacked together vertically along either side of the room.

A full list of pieces in the collection is available at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art Web site.

Pictured: Picasso’s “Painter and Model,” a part of the collection.