On the sting of an enormous park in Tehran sits a Neo-Brutalist construction the colour of sand. Inside is without doubt one of the best collections of contemporary Western artwork on the earth.
You enter the Tehran Museum of Up to date Artwork by an atrium that spirals downward like an inverted model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Images of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the daddy of Iran’s 1979 Revolution, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded him because the Islamic Republic’s supreme chief, glare down at you.
A collection of underground galleries awaits. There may be nothing fairly like the sensation of coming face-to-face for the primary time with its most sensational masterpiece: Jackson Pollock’s 1950 “Mural on Indian Pink Floor,” a 6-by-8-foot canvas, which was created with rusty reds and layered swirls of thick, dripped paint and is taken into account considered one of his greatest works from his most vital interval.
Monet, Pissarro, Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, Renoir, Gauguin, Matisse, Chagall, Klee, Whistler, Rodin, van Gogh, Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Magritte, Dalí, Miró, Johns, Warhol, Hockney, Lichtenstein, Bacon, Duchamp, Rothko, Man Ray — they’re all right here.
The museum was conceived by the Empress Farah Diba Pahlavi, spouse of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and opened to worldwide acclaim in 1977. Simply 15 months later, within the face of a large in style rebellion, the couple left the nation on what was formally referred to as a “trip.” The revolution changed the monarchy with an Islamic Republic weeks later. The brand new regime may have offered or destroyed the Western artwork masterpieces. As an alternative, the museum was closed, its treasures hidden in a concrete basement, and the shah’s palaces had been preserved and ultimately became museums. For years, the artwork assortment, purchased for lower than $100 million {dollars}, was protected however unseen; by some estimates, it’s now value as a lot as $3 billion.
Now, Donna Stein, an American curator who lived in Tehran between 1975 and 1977 and performed a small however vital function in assembling the gathering, has written a memoir, “The Empress and I: How an Historic Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Fashionable Artwork.”
It tells two interlocking tales: considered one of a rule-driven, hierarchical, often-dysfunctional forms that purchased Western artwork at surprisingly cheap costs for a monarchy flush with oil cash; one other of the day by day lifetime of an single younger American girl in Previous Regime Tehran.
This can be a work of settling scores. Stein, 78, the retired deputy director of the Wende Museum in Los Angeles, makes clear that she feels robbed of the credit score she deserves.
“As a result of I used to be a foreigner working largely in secret, my management function within the formation of the Nationwide Assortment has by no means been totally acknowledged,” she wrote within the foreword. Her male superiors, she added, “boldly grabbed the credit score for my aesthetic decisions.” Thus, “I’ve lastly written ‘The Empress and I’ to appropriate the document.”
Farah Diba Pahlavi selected a cousin, Kamran Diba, because the architect and founding director for the brand new museum that she would fill with trendy Iranian and Western artwork. Stein labored behind the scenes as a researcher and adviser for Karim Pasha Bahadori, the venture’s chief of employees and a childhood pal of the Empress.
Stein began small — writing an acquisition coverage, constructing a library and figuring out drawings, pictures and prints for buy by finding out public sale and personal gallery sale catalogs.
Quickly she was organizing scouting expeditions and drafting detailed memos on main works she hoped to amass for the gathering. She helped forge relationships with sellers, collectors and curators and have become a liaison between them and her superiors.
“I used to be the filter for high quality, and I used that filter very strongly,” she stated in a cellphone interview from Altadena in Los Angeles County, the place she lives along with her husband, Henry James Korn, a retired arts administration specialist. “To create an announcement of historical past and context and high quality and rarity, these had been the factors, not how a lot one thing price. In that respect, it was a dream job.”
However her function remained extraordinarily restricted. She by no means witnessed or participated in negotiations and didn’t know the costs paid for the works. With out that firsthand data, she can’t fill in some gaps in her memoir.
Stein started work whereas she was nonetheless dwelling in New York. Throughout a whirlwind 10-day shopping for spree in Might 1975, the museum’s acquisitions staff got here dwelling with 125 works that she stated she had recognized for buy. They included vital items by Picasso: a Cubist portray “Open Window on the Rue de Penthièvre in Paris,” a tapestry “Secrets and techniques (Confidences) or Inspiration,” and a bronze sculpture “Baboon and Younger.” She adored the sculpture, as a result of, Stein stated, “I used to be in search of issues that might be accessible for an uneducated viewers. It was simply enchanting.”
She noticed Calder’s “The Orange Fish” cellular throughout that journey, because of a dialog with Klaus Perls, the proprietor of the Perls Galleries and Calder’s major seller in the USA. Stein and her colleagues additionally visited the SoHo loft of the Museum of Fashionable Artwork curator William Rubin to review Pollock’s “Mural on Indian Pink Floor” earlier than its buy. “I wasn’t the one who discovered the portray, however I favored it enormously,” she stated.
In Iran, she reported to Bahadori, whom she described as “distant”; she may go months with out seeing him. After an incident through which he made advances, which she rejected, “he couldn’t look me within the eye,” she wrote. As well as, she claims he knew nothing about artwork. “Each time I had conferences with him, I felt it was my job train him the historical past of artwork,” she stated.
Ultimately she gained his belief and he or she urged him to purchase boldly: sculptures together with Alberto Giacometti’s “Standing Lady I” and “Strolling Man I”; Mark Rothko’s “Sienna, Orange and Black on Darkish Brown” and “No. 2 (Yellow Middle)”; Roy Lichtenstein’s “Roto Broil”; and prints reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s “Self-Portrait.” She pushed for the acquisition of Francis Bacon’s “Reclining Man With Sculpture” and “Final Object,” a singular Dada sculpture by Man Ray from his metronome collection, after they got here up for public sale.
However Bahadori was the general public face of the staff; Stein was compelled to remain within the shadows. Her suspicion that he “had stolen the credit score for my laborious work elevated over time,” Stein wrote. Her standing on the museum deteriorated when Diba was named director. “I turned the centerpiece of everybody’s push for energy, and ultimately I had no function,” she stated.
She even was accused of bribery. “Bribery was the best way of working in Iran, and I used to be accused by individuals who knew higher, that I wouldn’t take bribes,” she stated.
She left Iran in mid-1977, returning for a brief go to when the museum opened that October.
In her memoir, Stein additionally tells the story of her determination to give up her job as an assistant curator at MoMA to stay in Iran. “I used to be totally unprepared for the shock of the extraordinary warmth in addition to the complexities that dwelling within the Third World would arouse.”
She discovered a one-bedroom condo with central heating, air-conditioning and a shopping center on the decrease ranges. She was allowed to journey freely all through the nation, even to distant locations like Rasht within the north and Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf.
In an period when the SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, spied on, arrested, tortured and killed his political opponents, she stated: “I lived my life commonly. I didn’t fear about speaking on the cellphone.”
She had Iranian buddies but additionally embraced the massive American expatriate neighborhood. (She describes a July 4 occasion for 1,000 visitors hosted by Richard Helms, the American Ambassador and former director of Central Intelligence, on the huge embassy compound, lengthy earlier than militants seized it and held American diplomats hostage for 444 days.)
Alcohol was authorized and plentiful in that period. One all-night occasion hosted by a rich younger Qajar prince at his “Hollywood-style playboy mansion” in Isfahan “turned out to be an surprising train in debauchery,” the place some visitors drank alcohol, smoked opium or cannabis and used cocaine, she wrote.
Although she determined to border the ebook round Farah Diba Pahlavi, whom she refers to within the ebook as a “confidante,” Stein stated she had solely three temporary encounters with the empress in Iran; her solely face-to-face encounter along with her after that was an interview in New York in 1991.
In an electronic mail response to written questions, Farah Diba Pahlavi stated: “Donna Stein was knowledgeable, hardworking particular person who delivered outcomes. I trusted her opinion. We’ve got a pleasant relationship, and we talk by cellphone, though not too usually.”
She added that “Ms. Stein established a considerable group of acquisitions in all media as the idea for a severe nationwide assortment of contemporary and modern artwork.”
A really completely different look into the historical past of the museum and its artworks is present in a limited-edition 2018 coffee-table ebook, “Iran Fashionable: The Empress of Artwork.” A foreword by Farah Diba Pahlavi tells the story from her perspective, together with her private encounters with artists like Chagall, Moore, Dalí and Warhol. “We couldn’t afford previous international masterpieces, however we may afford trendy artwork,” she wrote. She began on a certain footing — with the French Impressionists — and moved ahead in time. Lavishly illustrated, protected in a linen clamshell presentation case, the ebook comes with
white gloves and a signature canvas tote bag. It prices $895.
As for the museum, its Western artwork assortment stays intact, aside from a Warhol portrait of Farah Diba Pahlavi — slashed way back at one of many former palaces by a vandal — and Willem de Kooning’s “Lady III,” which the museum traded in 1994 for the remnants of a Sixteenth-century ebook, generally known as the Shahnameh, or Guide of Kings, containing miniatures. (Bought for lower than $1 million by the Iranians, in response to Stein, “Lady III” offered privately in 2006 to the hedge-fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen for $137.5 million.) The Islamic Republic’s first complete exhibition of the Western artwork assortment was in 2005, and a few works, such because the Pollock, are on everlasting show. Others, together with Renoir’s “Gabrielle With Open Shirt” (1907), that includes a girl with bare breasts, have by no means been publicly proven.
After a 32-month renovation, the museum reopened in late January with an exhibition of conceptual images and picks from 700 artworks donated by the property of a widely known Iranian collector. The museum will publish its personal examine of the gathering — it’ll require six volumes to inform the story.