Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, (
Persian: موزه هنرهای معاصر تهران), also known as TMoCA, is among the largest
art museums in
Tehran and
Iran. It has collections of more than 3,000 items that include 19th and 20th century's world-class European and American paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures. TMoCA also has one of the greatest collections of
Iranian modern and contemporary art.
The museum was inaugurated by Empress
Farah Pahlavi (
Persian: فرح پهلوی), née Farah Diba (دیبا), in 1977, just two years before the
1979 Revolution.[1][2] TMoCA is considered to have the most valuable collections of
modern Western masterpieces outside Europe and North America.[3]
Background
According to Farah Pahlavi, the former Empress of Iran, the idea for this museum happened when she was in conversation with artist
Iran Darroudi during a gallery opening in the 1970s and Darroudi mentioned she wished there was a place to show work more permanently.[4] The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art museum was supposed to be a place to show contemporary and modern Iranian artist alongside other international artists doing similar work.[4]
The museum was designed by Iranian architect and cousin of the queen,
Kamran Diba, who employed elements from traditional
Persian architecture of
Yazd,
Kashan and other desert towns.[5][6] It was built adjacent to Farah Park, renamed
Laleh Park after the Islamic revolution, and was inaugurated in 1977.[7] The building itself can be regarded as an example of contemporary art, in a style of an underground New York
Guggenheim Museum.[8] Most of the museum area is located underground with a circular walkway that spirals downwards with galleries branching outwards.[8] Western sculptures by artists such as Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte and Moore can be found in the museum's gardens.[8][9]
The selection of the art was done under Farah Pahlavi and the budget was from the
National Iranian Oil Company.[4] Pahlavi personally met many of the artists whose work was part of the museum collection, including the Western artists
Marc Chagall,
Salvador Dalí,
Henry Moore,
Paul Jenkins,
Arnaldo Pomodoro.[4] Some people involved in the process of selecting art were the Americans, Donna Stein and David Galloway, and Kamran Diba, the architect and director of the museum, and Karimpasha Bahadori, who was the Chief of Staff of the cabinet.[4][10]
After the
Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Western art was stored away in the museum's vault until 1999 when the first post-revolution exhibition was held of western art showing artists such as
David Hockney,
Roy Lichtenstein,
Robert Rauschenberg and
Andy Warhol.[8] Now pieces of the Western art collection are shown for a few weeks every year but due to the current conservative nature of the Iranian establishment, most pieces will never be shown.[8]
It is considered to have the most valuable collection of Western modern art outside Europe and the United States, a collection largely assembled by founding curators David Galloway and Donna Stein under the patronage of Farah Pahlavi.[4][11] It is said that there is approximately £2.5
billion worth of modern art held at the museum.[12] The museum hosts a revolving program of exhibitions and occasionally organizes exhibitions by local artists.
Collection curator Donna Stein later wrote a memoir, The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art (2021), because she felt she was not properly credited for her role in curating this collection.[10]
Politics
In 1977, the Empress of Iran, Farah Pahlavi, purchased expensive Western artwork, in order to open this contemporary art museum. This museum was a controversial act, because the country's social and economic inequalities were rising and the government at the time was acting as a dictatorship and not tolerating the rising opponents, a few years later the
Iranian Revolution took place. A few art pieces did not survive the revolution including a public statue by
Bahman Mohasses deemed un-Islamic and a 1977 Warhol painting, a portrait of Farah Pahlavi.[4]
Le Monde art critic André Fermigier wrote an article in 1977 called "A museum for whom and for what?", "questioning the link between an Iranian child and a
Picasso or a
Pollock".[13] And Farah Pahlavi responded to this criticism, noting that Iranians can understand modern art, not all Iranians were living in remote villages, and this issue with modern art was not unlike one that had existed in France.[13]
A touring exhibition was planned for autumn 2016 in
Berlin, (Germany), consisting of a three-month tour of sixty artworks, half Western and half Iranian. The show was to run for three months in Berlin, then travel to the
Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome for display from March through August.[14] However, the plan had to be postponed because the Iranian authorities had failed to allow the paintings to leave the country, also noting that, since the revolution, these paintings had not been shown in Iran.[15] Finally, on 27 Dec 2016, a press release by
Hermann Parzinger, the President of the organising committee, Berlin's Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (in German : Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin), cancelled the exhibition altogether.[16][17]
In 2017 the TMoCA unexpectedly staged a show in Tehran which included the very works which were selected to travel to Europe: Berlin-Rome Travellers, Selected Worksof the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.[18] It can be considered kind of an acte de résistance on the part of the museum director at the time, since, with the advent of
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected president of Iran in 2005, a harsh conservative wind has, to this day, blown away the relative openness and pragmatism of the
Rafsanjani and
Khatami eras.
Note : Woman III, 1953, was de-accessioned and traded in 1994 for a rare 16th century Persian manuscript of the
Tahmasbi Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, containing precious miniatures [11][36]
Günther Uecker. Huldigung an Hafez. Homage to Hafez - Bemühungen von/With the efforts of Günther Uecker und/and Ehsan Aghaei, exhibition catalogue, Kunstverlag Till Breckner & Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Düsseldorf, 186 p., ISBN 978-3-9394-522-87, 2016 (in German, English, Farsi)
Mehdi Hasani : A Review of Foreign Works in TMOCA, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017.[127]
Viola Raikhel-Bolot, Miranda Darling : Iran Modern: The Empress of Art, published by
Assouline, 200 p., ISBN 9781614286349, 2018.[128]
Donna Stein : The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art, Skira, 280 p., ISBN 9788857244341, 2021.[129]
ARD Iran-Correspondent Natalie Amiri : Der verborgene Schatz. Die legendäre Kunstsammlung des Iran (The Hidden Treasure. The Legendary Art Collection of Iran) |
Arte, 2017, 55 min. (in German) [130]
^Left panel and
right panel of the triptych "Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants" can be viewed; the
central panel is deemed too racy by the museum to show en salle...
^Suzanne Pagé (1994). André Derain : le peintre du "trouble moderne" [André Derain : The painter of the "Modern Trouble"] (exhibition catalogue : Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 18 Nov 1994 - 19 March 1995) (in French). Paris: Paris Musées.
ISBN978-2-87900-176-0.
^Photogenic drawing of a
Single Fern, page from the Album di disegni fotogenici (1839-1840) by William Henry Fox Talbot British & (likely) Sebastiano Tassinari (metmuseum.org)
Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, (
Persian: موزه هنرهای معاصر تهران), also known as TMoCA, is among the largest
art museums in
Tehran and
Iran. It has collections of more than 3,000 items that include 19th and 20th century's world-class European and American paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures. TMoCA also has one of the greatest collections of
Iranian modern and contemporary art.
The museum was inaugurated by Empress
Farah Pahlavi (
Persian: فرح پهلوی), née Farah Diba (دیبا), in 1977, just two years before the
1979 Revolution.[1][2] TMoCA is considered to have the most valuable collections of
modern Western masterpieces outside Europe and North America.[3]
Background
According to Farah Pahlavi, the former Empress of Iran, the idea for this museum happened when she was in conversation with artist
Iran Darroudi during a gallery opening in the 1970s and Darroudi mentioned she wished there was a place to show work more permanently.[4] The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art museum was supposed to be a place to show contemporary and modern Iranian artist alongside other international artists doing similar work.[4]
The museum was designed by Iranian architect and cousin of the queen,
Kamran Diba, who employed elements from traditional
Persian architecture of
Yazd,
Kashan and other desert towns.[5][6] It was built adjacent to Farah Park, renamed
Laleh Park after the Islamic revolution, and was inaugurated in 1977.[7] The building itself can be regarded as an example of contemporary art, in a style of an underground New York
Guggenheim Museum.[8] Most of the museum area is located underground with a circular walkway that spirals downwards with galleries branching outwards.[8] Western sculptures by artists such as Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte and Moore can be found in the museum's gardens.[8][9]
The selection of the art was done under Farah Pahlavi and the budget was from the
National Iranian Oil Company.[4] Pahlavi personally met many of the artists whose work was part of the museum collection, including the Western artists
Marc Chagall,
Salvador Dalí,
Henry Moore,
Paul Jenkins,
Arnaldo Pomodoro.[4] Some people involved in the process of selecting art were the Americans, Donna Stein and David Galloway, and Kamran Diba, the architect and director of the museum, and Karimpasha Bahadori, who was the Chief of Staff of the cabinet.[4][10]
After the
Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Western art was stored away in the museum's vault until 1999 when the first post-revolution exhibition was held of western art showing artists such as
David Hockney,
Roy Lichtenstein,
Robert Rauschenberg and
Andy Warhol.[8] Now pieces of the Western art collection are shown for a few weeks every year but due to the current conservative nature of the Iranian establishment, most pieces will never be shown.[8]
It is considered to have the most valuable collection of Western modern art outside Europe and the United States, a collection largely assembled by founding curators David Galloway and Donna Stein under the patronage of Farah Pahlavi.[4][11] It is said that there is approximately £2.5
billion worth of modern art held at the museum.[12] The museum hosts a revolving program of exhibitions and occasionally organizes exhibitions by local artists.
Collection curator Donna Stein later wrote a memoir, The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art (2021), because she felt she was not properly credited for her role in curating this collection.[10]
Politics
In 1977, the Empress of Iran, Farah Pahlavi, purchased expensive Western artwork, in order to open this contemporary art museum. This museum was a controversial act, because the country's social and economic inequalities were rising and the government at the time was acting as a dictatorship and not tolerating the rising opponents, a few years later the
Iranian Revolution took place. A few art pieces did not survive the revolution including a public statue by
Bahman Mohasses deemed un-Islamic and a 1977 Warhol painting, a portrait of Farah Pahlavi.[4]
Le Monde art critic André Fermigier wrote an article in 1977 called "A museum for whom and for what?", "questioning the link between an Iranian child and a
Picasso or a
Pollock".[13] And Farah Pahlavi responded to this criticism, noting that Iranians can understand modern art, not all Iranians were living in remote villages, and this issue with modern art was not unlike one that had existed in France.[13]
A touring exhibition was planned for autumn 2016 in
Berlin, (Germany), consisting of a three-month tour of sixty artworks, half Western and half Iranian. The show was to run for three months in Berlin, then travel to the
Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome for display from March through August.[14] However, the plan had to be postponed because the Iranian authorities had failed to allow the paintings to leave the country, also noting that, since the revolution, these paintings had not been shown in Iran.[15] Finally, on 27 Dec 2016, a press release by
Hermann Parzinger, the President of the organising committee, Berlin's Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (in German : Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin), cancelled the exhibition altogether.[16][17]
In 2017 the TMoCA unexpectedly staged a show in Tehran which included the very works which were selected to travel to Europe: Berlin-Rome Travellers, Selected Worksof the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.[18] It can be considered kind of an acte de résistance on the part of the museum director at the time, since, with the advent of
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected president of Iran in 2005, a harsh conservative wind has, to this day, blown away the relative openness and pragmatism of the
Rafsanjani and
Khatami eras.
Note : Woman III, 1953, was de-accessioned and traded in 1994 for a rare 16th century Persian manuscript of the
Tahmasbi Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, containing precious miniatures [11][36]
Günther Uecker. Huldigung an Hafez. Homage to Hafez - Bemühungen von/With the efforts of Günther Uecker und/and Ehsan Aghaei, exhibition catalogue, Kunstverlag Till Breckner & Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, Düsseldorf, 186 p., ISBN 978-3-9394-522-87, 2016 (in German, English, Farsi)
Mehdi Hasani : A Review of Foreign Works in TMOCA, Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017.[127]
Viola Raikhel-Bolot, Miranda Darling : Iran Modern: The Empress of Art, published by
Assouline, 200 p., ISBN 9781614286349, 2018.[128]
Donna Stein : The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art, Skira, 280 p., ISBN 9788857244341, 2021.[129]
ARD Iran-Correspondent Natalie Amiri : Der verborgene Schatz. Die legendäre Kunstsammlung des Iran (The Hidden Treasure. The Legendary Art Collection of Iran) |
Arte, 2017, 55 min. (in German) [130]
^Left panel and
right panel of the triptych "Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants" can be viewed; the
central panel is deemed too racy by the museum to show en salle...
^Suzanne Pagé (1994). André Derain : le peintre du "trouble moderne" [André Derain : The painter of the "Modern Trouble"] (exhibition catalogue : Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 18 Nov 1994 - 19 March 1995) (in French). Paris: Paris Musées.
ISBN978-2-87900-176-0.
^Photogenic drawing of a
Single Fern, page from the Album di disegni fotogenici (1839-1840) by William Henry Fox Talbot British & (likely) Sebastiano Tassinari (metmuseum.org)