Ирандағы заманауи өнер мұражайы

Museum in Iran

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. TMoCA is considered to have the most valuable collections of modern Western masterpieces outside Europe and North America.

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. It was built adjacent to Farah Park, renamed Laleh Park after the Islamic revolution, and was inaugurated in 1977. The building itself can be regarded as an example of contemporary art, in a style of an underground New York Guggenheim Museum. Western sculptures by artists such as Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte and Moore can be found in the museum's gardens. The selection of the art was done under Farah Pahlavi and the budget was from the National Iranian Oil Company. 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. It is said that there is approximately £2.5 billion worth of modern art held at the museum. 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. 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". 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. 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. 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. 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 Works of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. 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.

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)