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Just before the 1979 revolution, Iran spent its oil wealth building one of the great modern-art collections outside the West. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1977 under the patronage of Empress Farah Pahlavi, in a low building of raw concrete designed by her cousin Kamran Diba, its curving rooftop scoops echoing the wind-towers of old Persian houses.
The purchases were extraordinary, Pollock and Rothko, Warhol and Bacon, Monet and Gauguin, bought at the top of the market. After the revolution most of it went into a basement vault and stayed largely unseen for decades, judged too Western to show and too valuable to sell. Some of those works now surface in rotating displays, so on a given visit a Tehran gallery might be showing an American drip painting that has spent much of its life underground.
