[LINK] "Hidden For Decades, Pollocks, Rothkos And More Go On Display In Iran"

[rfmcdonald]

NPR reports on the opening of the closed art galleries of Iran, filled with works accumulated under the Shah but kept behind lock and key since the Islamic Revolution, to the public. As an art lover, I'm glad.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has a new exhibition and the lineup of artists is stunning: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Rauschenberg, just to name a few.

The art, now worth billions, was bought in the 1970s under Shah Reza Pahlavi, whose coffers were overflowing with oil revenue at the time. The shah sought to modernize and Westernize the country in general, and put his wife, Empress Farah Pahlavi, in charge of acquiring the art.

The result was considered by some to be the greatest collection of contemporary Western masterpieces outside of Europe and North America. The trove includes works by Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and roughly 30 by Pablo Picasso.

"The latest things that were available in Western galleries, they were bought for the collection here. All the big names from the beginning of the 20th century until the '70s, you know, we have them," Faryar Javaherian, one of the curators of the exhibition, tells Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep.

When the shah was ousted in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, everything Western instantly became toxic. The Western art was placed in a vault at the museum. For years, the museum was closed, then was used to display revolutionary propaganda. The museum has kept its Western collection hidden away, though in recent years, it has been displaying a few Western pieces for several weeks at a time.