TEHRAN: Thousands of artists’ lovers thronged the art museum where the world’s most prized works of contemporary western art have been unveiled for the first time in decades in Tehran.
The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric, rails against the influence of the west. Authorities have condemned “deviant” artists for “attacking Iran’s revolutionary culture”. And the Islamic Republic has plunged further into confrontation with the US and Europe as it rapidly accelerates its nuclear programme and diplomatic efforts stall.
But contradictions abound in the Iranian capital, where thousands of well-heeled men and women looked at 19th- and 20th-century American and European minimalist and conceptual masterpieces on display this summer for the first time at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.
The government of Iran’s western-backed shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and his wife, the former empress Farah Pahlavi, built the museum and acquired the multibillion-dollar collection in the late 1970s, when oil boomed and western economies stagnated.