Khomeini, Warhol, and the Forbidden Paintings

The Islamic Republic sought to drive out Western influence. Yet in the storerooms of a Tehran museum, it still preserves nearly three billion dollars’ worth of modern masterpieces.

In the basement of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art lies a world the Islamic Republic believed it had expelled from Iranian history.

Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Warhol, Bacon, Giacometti, Magritte: the masters of European and American modernism survived the fall of the Shah, the revolution, the war with Iraq, and nearly half a century of ideological condemnation.

Some works remained unseen for decades. Others, deemed too sensual, too foreign, or simply too free, could be shown only with caution. Yet almost all of them remained in Iran.

This collection tells a story far greater than that of an Islamic regime owning nudes and Pop Art. It reveals a truth revolutions often discover too late: it is easier to overthrow a government than to abolish value.

When Oil Bought Modernity

In the mid-1970s, Iran was rich. Oil prices had soared, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi intended to transform the country at breakneck speed. His wife, Farah Pahlavi, wanted culture to be part of that modernisation.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1977. Designed by the Iranian architect Kamran Diba, it was meant to place Iranian creativity within the international history of modern art.

The timing was exceptional. The art market had not yet experienced its later explosion. Works now beyond the reach of museums were still circulating, while Tehran had abundant petrodollars at its disposal.

Iran acquired Picassos, Gauguins, Renoirs, Pollocks, Warhols, Légers, and Giacomettis, alongside major Iranian artists. The result was not merely an accumulation of prestigious names. It was intended to tell the story of modernity, from Impressionism to the American avant-garde.

Andy Warhol produced portraits of the Shah, the Empress, and Princess Ashraf. The Factory and the Iranian monarchy seemed to belong to the same globalised, sophisticated elite, convinced of its own permanence.

Two years later, that world collapsed.

The Revolution Enters the Museum

In 1979, the monarchy was overthrown. The Islamic Republic set about erasing the symbols of the former regime and fighting what it regarded as cultural submission to foreign influence.

The museum immediately became problematic.

Its acquisitions had been financed under the Shah. Some depicted naked bodies. Others bore the signatures of American artists. Many celebrated a formal or sexual freedom incompatible with the new official morality.

A Warhol portrait of Farah Pahlavi was slashed. Yet most of the collection was placed in storage rather than destroyed.

Francis Bacon’s triptych Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants encapsulates the contradiction. Its central panel depicts two naked men lying on a bed. The work still belongs to the Tehran museum, but its subject makes its display politically difficult.

An almost unique situation thus emerged: the Iranian state owned works it could neither fully celebrate nor freely exhibit, yet could not destroy without mutilating its own cultural heritage.

Those Who Guarded the Storerooms

The survival of the collection was not the achievement of one isolated hero. It was the work of generations of Iranian employees, directors, and specialists who maintained the works in storage, monitored their condition, and prevented their dispersal.

In 2015, when curator Germano Celant and Iranian curator Faryar Javaherian examined the holdings, they found works sufficiently well preserved that no major restoration was required.

In 2024, curator Jamal Arabzadeh performed another act of preservation: he returned part of the collection to the public. His exhibition Eye to Eye brought together more than 120 portraits by Iranian and international artists, including Picasso, Warhol, and Bacon.

Saving a collection does not mean merely preventing its destruction. It also means preserving its memory and, when circumstances permit, restoring its visibility.

Three Billion Dollars — On Paper

The collection is generally valued at around three billion dollars. The figure remains approximate: it does not come from a recent, public, work-by-work appraisal.

Comparing it directly with the Louvre or MoMA would be misleading. Major public collections are not assembled for liquidation, and many of their masterpieces are legally inalienable.

Another comparison nonetheless provides a sense of scale. The Paul G. Allen collection, the largest private collection ever sold at auction, raised about $1.6 billion in 2022. The estimate attached to the Tehran museum is therefore almost twice the proceeds of that historic sale.

But this wealth is largely theoretical.

Market value assumes an owner free to sell, buyers authorised to pay, banks able to transfer the funds, and insurers willing to cover transport. None of this is straightforward in Iran’s case.

US sanctions do not automatically prohibit every transaction involving a work of art. But banks, auction houses, and insurers must verify the seller’s identity, the recipient of the payment, and the financial channels used. A transaction involving an Iranian state entity can therefore become legally and diplomatically explosive.

The museum cannot liquidate a Pollock as a bank sells a bond. Price protects the collection as much as it imprisons it.

A Nude for the Book of Kings

In 1994, Iran nevertheless decided to part with one work: Willem de Kooning’s Woman III, a nude that had become virtually impossible to exhibit.

On the tarmac of Vienna airport, the painting was exchanged for the text, binding, and 118 miniatures of the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, one of the most magnificent Persian manuscripts of the sixteenth century.

The operation appeared to fulfil the regime’s ideological dream: surrendering a female body from the American avant-garde in return for the Persian Book of Kings.

The market then added its own irony. Valued at around $20 million at the time of the exchange, Woman III was sold in 2006 to financier Steven Cohen for $137.5 million.

Iran had not necessarily misunderstood its value. It had chosen another definition of value: identity over price, symbolic restitution over financial appreciation.

Yet that subsequent rise also revealed what Tehran’s storerooms had contained since 1977: one of the most spectacular sovereign investments ever made in the modern art market.

2024: An Opening That Was Not Quite an Opening

The Eye to Eye exhibition opened on 6 October 2024, thirty-five years after Khomeini’s death.

Iran was still deeply marked by the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement that emerged in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini. The election of Masoud Pezeshkian, presented as a reformist, had raised hopes of a limited social easing without altering the authoritarian structure of the regime.

Inside the museum’s galleries, many female visitors appeared with their hair uncovered. The authorities did not acknowledge this act of disobedience, but temporarily tolerated it.

The exhibition therefore did not signal a broad liberalisation. It represented a narrow cultural breathing space: a place where the Iranian public could contemplate images forbidden elsewhere, while the state temporarily agreed not to see everything taking place before them.

The Art the Regime Owns but Cannot Possess

Under the Shah, the collection was meant to prove that Iran belonged to international modernity.

Under the Islamic Republic, it demonstrates something else: Iran can preserve that modernity materially while rejecting it symbolically.

The regime condemns certain representations of the body, yet protects the canvases that contain them. It opposes American influence, yet retains its Warhols and Pollocks. It repudiates the political order that created the museum, yet claims the museum as national heritage.

The works have therefore changed function without changing ownership. They are no longer emblems of triumphant Westernisation. They have become silent witnesses to what the revolution failed to erase.

Revolutions can change laws, clothing, statues, and street names. They can ban an image, imprison an artist, or close a museum.

They find it far harder to abolish what generations have recognised as irreplaceable.

In the basements of Tehran, the old world never disappeared. It remained there, silent, guarded, and at times forbidden — but still priceless.