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The Hidden Wonders of The Tehran Museum*
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Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art |
It
houses the most important collection of modern and contemporary art south of the
Mediterranean. Yet it has remained almost invisible since 1979. The
accomplishment of Empress Farah Pahlavi’s wish, the Tehran Museum of
Contemporary Art contains major masterpieces of Western art. But ever since the
revolution they have been relegated to the storerooms.
The
building itself is a modernist cross between New York’s Guggenheim Museum for
its entrance, and the Saint-Paul-de-Vence Maeght Foundation for its exhibition
rooms. It has vegetated for a long time to the point of being unknown to most of
the consecrated guides to Iran. Since 1998, its new director, Alireza Sami Azar,
has carefully attempted to give it back some of its luster. With that in mind,
he has initiated an ambitious program of scholarly conferences.
Iranians
have been able to initiate themselves to Presocratic
philosophy, attend seminars on Saint Thomas Aquinas, Heidegger, or the
“influence of Cartesian epistemology1 on modern aesthetic
theories”.
None
of the great thinkers on the philosophy of art—from Baumgarten to Marx, by way
of Freud, Jung, Kant, Hegel or Nietzsche—are foreign to them any longer.
If
it is by no means unanimously accepted by the local political class, this
Iranian-style “glasnost”2 has nonetheless led the museum to organize the
first exhibition on a Western artist within its walls. Even worse, this artist
is a Franco-American—Arman—to whom a retrospective is being devoted. The
artist, who came to Tehran for the occasion with Daniel Abadie, director of
Paris’s Jeu de Paume Gallery and lying at the project’s origin, did not
spare his words during the press conference that preceded the opening. “Art
has no borders. You should be proud to have such a collection here and you must
show the entire world that it exists,” he insisted. This is a delicate issue
in Tehran.
The
fact is Europeans have only recently been offered a glimpse, in very small
doses, of the wealth lying in the museum’s collections. The Iranians lent
Composition (L'Age d'Or), one of Andre Derain’s most important works, to the
City of Paris Museum of Modern Art for a retrospective on the artist. It had not
been seen for 25 years. The same comment applies for the Chillida
sculpture, on loan to the Jeu
de Paume, the Rothko or Warhol, visiting the Beyeler Foundation in Basel
(Switzerland), or Max Ernst’s L’Histoire naturelle, entrusted to Werner
Spies for his two exhibitions on Surrealism in Paris and Dusseldorf (Germany).
Joyous
Abstraction
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Art Galleries in Tehran Museum |
Apart
from the Chillida, usually resting on the lawn at the museum’s entrance, or
the joyously abstract Rothko, most of the paintings are not exhibited at the
Tehran. The tenacious obsession of figurative painters with the female nude has
left their work unshowable in an Islamic Republic.
On
the other hand, the stunning Mural on Indian Red Ground, painted by Jackson
Pollock in 1950, and also the paintings of Kline, Motherwell, Gottlieb, Tobey,
Hartung, Soulages and many others, are less compromising in the eyes of the
mullahs. They are currently regrouped in the galleries under the title of
“Abstract Expressionism”.
The
museum’s opening to what is foreign bothers some sectors in Tehran. While Mr.
Sami Azar may have received a gold medal from the US National Art Club in April
2003 in recognition for the “Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s active role
in reinforcing the level of science and promoting Iranian artists,” he is
still the object of serious attacks in his country. Some even accuse him of
selling works that were on loan and to replacing them with copies.
The
rumor has spread, fuelled by certain irresponsible and unscrupulous Western art
dealers who confirmed holding sales orders over the works in the collection. The
loans made to the Beyeler Foundation, associated to the eponymous gallery,
seemed to give these claims a semblance of truth. At
Beyeler, however, any such claim has been denied wholesale: “Nothing is for
sale. Some dubious intermediaries are only trying to make believe.”
There
have certainly been precedents to these rumors. In 1994, Iran negotiated the
exchange of one of De Kooning’s Women, owned by the museum, for a 16th century
manuscript of the Tahmasbi Shahnameh3 (Epic of Kings) from an American
collection. The latter is a masterpiece of world artistic heritage. The Iranians
lost nothing in the trade. In February 2003, there was also talk of selling
certain paintings that had been relegated to the storerooms. The issue was even
debated in Parliament. “Why not get rid of them since they cannot be
exhibited?” To which the doctors of theology wisely rebutted, “What cannot
be exhibited cannot be sold either.”
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Teheran's Museum of Contemporary Art, built in the 70s just before the Shah was deposed |
Whether
they are in fact not showable remains something to be seen, then. We were able
to visit the museum storerooms. Even though one has to know the password and be
a tad insistent, the task proved to be nothing out of the ordinary: the artworks
are accessible to scholars, professionals and artists.
The
large underground room is named after an immense Picasso from 1927, Painter and
Model. And as the white-gloved employees began sliding out the mobile picture
rails, an 1889 Gauguin appeared, Still Life with Japanese Print. A
Toulouse-Lautrec followed from the same year, Fille de Montmartre, then a
Kandinsky, several works by Miro, Grosz and a color drawing by Ensor, a sketch
of the Entry of Christ into Brussels. A very rare Leger from 1913 was next, but
also works by Bacon, never seen since leaving the studio, and Warhol,
Lichtenstein, Vasarely or Jenkins, Arp or Nicholson. Further down, out
majestically slid an enormous Rauschenberg, 1977’s Narcissus Convoy.
A
Godsend for Western Galleries
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Director Sami Azar: an architect with a doctorate from the university of Birminghan |
It
is a fantastic collection. Furthermore, it has the advantage of providing a
snapshot of a period in the history of taste. This was a time in the 1970s when
the extremely wealthy undertook the creation of a museum from scratch. The
complete inventory would be too long to list here, but we would stay angry with
ourselves were we to fail to mention a set of hyperrealists. All of them carry
on the backside the tag of the Galerie des 4 Mouvements—once run by Marcel
Fleiss from 1973 to 1977.
The
works recall the circumstances under which they were acquired. Those in charge
of the museum in the Shah’s time aspired to repeat the exhibition Fleiss had
organized in his Paris gallery. Only now, it would be shown in Tehran. After the
opening, the museum directors simply let Fleiss know that they would be
purchasing the entire set of paintings. Fleiss could only oblige: permission was
granted with a discount. All dealers remember that godsend. While Western
economies were hit with the oil crisis, the museum saved many a gallery from
bankruptcy after 1974.
Nowadays,
the acquisitions are less spectacular. During the press conference, Mr. Sami
Azar was questioned as to the rumors on the museum’s collection. He aimed at
setting matters straight, reminding all those concerned that his museum
scrupulously follows international rules on matters of lending paintings.
What’s more, the museum usually passes through the diplomatic intermediaries
of the countries involved, a government warrant being so much more to lean on in
case of litigation. “We do not intend to sell anything whatsoever,” he
repeated. “What we want, on the contrary, is to buy the works of artists who
are missing from our collections.”
*By
Harry Bellet, Le Monde, May 5, 2003, translated for
IslamOnline.net by Norman Madarasz (nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca)
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