1977, the Center Pompidou is inaugurated in Paris. At the same time, two years before the Islamic Revolution, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMOCA) opens its doors in La Park Laleh in Tehran, on the initiative of Queen Farah Pahlavi (born in 1938), wife of the last shah d ‘Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919-1980). The museum presents its art collection, “One of the rarest treasures in modern art outside the West”according to the art historian Hamid Keshmirshekan.
To house the collection, the architect and cousin of Farah Pahlavi, Kamran Diba (born in 1937), designed a building which takes up elements of traditional Persian architecture while referring to the architecture of the Guggenheim Museum New York Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959). The museum appears as an inverted version of the latter. The galleries extend in a spiral down (and not upwards). Kamran Diba also becomes the first director of the museum.
Constituted from 1973, when oil prices increased in Iran, on the advice of art critics Donna Stein and David Galloway, architect Kamran Diba and the chief of staff of the Queen, the Queen’s collection Of almost 3,000 works is estimated today at around $ 3 billion (2.8 billion euros). It includes, among other things, works by Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Vincent Van Gogh, Max Ernst, Andy Warhol, Pierre Soulages and many Iranian painters including Bahman Mohasse (1931-2010) or Parviz Tanavoli (born in 1937 ).
The collection included at the time a portrait of Farah Pahlavi by Andy Warhol, but which was lacerated by the revolutionaries who seized the Iranian capital in 1979.
View of the exhibition “Eye to Eye” at Tmoca.
© Tehran Times / Bahman Vakhshour
The revolution has dropped the government of the Shah, Farah Pahlavi fled and the fierce struggle of the Ayatollahs regime against “Gharbzadegi” (“Westernization – submerged by Western culture”) forced the museum to move the museum collection Western art towards the darkness of the cellars. “I was very worried about the fate of these paintings during these events, I was afraid that the revolutionaries destroy them, but fortunately, the museum staff protected them in the cellar and Mehdi Kowsar, the director of the Faculty of Architecture From the University of Tehran, listed all the works and helped protect them in this cellar. He then became director of the museum after the departure of Kamran Diba ”said Farah Pahlavi to the Guardian. The queen did not take anything with her, saying that the collection belonged to Iran.
Since then, the Western art collection has followed the course of Iranian policy, sometimes invisible, sometimes exhibiting certain works. In 1999, under the mandate of the head of state Mohammad Khatami, the art historian Alireza Sami Azar organized international extension exhibitions, including a retrospective by the artist Arman (1928-2005), until to the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the head of the State in 2005 to again suffer the cultural momentum.
In recent years, the situation has changed with the election to the Presidency of the Republic of Hassan Rohani between 2013 and 2021. He had announced his ambitions to make the collection known internationally and to initiate possible loans to D ‘Other institutions.
Recently took place the exhibition “Eye to Eye” presented at Tmoca from October 2024 to January 2025 under the police station of Jamal Arabzadeh, professor at the University of Tehran Arts. Among the 120 portraits presented: Tables by Francis Bacon, Robert Rauschenberg, Fernand Léger, Jazeh Tabatabai (1931-2008), Kambiz Derambakhshshshshshsh (1942-2021), Gholamhossein Nami (born in 1936), Mehdi Sahabi (1944-2009).
