One of the most inaccessible art collections in the world awaits liberation in Tehran |
In March 2025, art enthusiasts celebrated an extraordinary milestone. A masterpiece by Pablo Picasso, “The Painter and His Model,” went on display for only the second time in decades. It was shown at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, in a rare celebration of a different face of Iran — and with similarly rare approval from the Islamic regime.
The 1927 painting was recently described by Bloomberg as “arguably the most important canvas in the world that cannot be visited or seen.” The work that helped inspire Picasso’s “Guernica” — which showcases the destruction caused by the Spanish Civil War — now sits in what Bloomberg called “one of the world’s most dangerous cities.”
The current war is only tertiarily preventing the piece from being made available to the public, and little is known about the museum’s current fate. Its website, like many others in Iran, has been down, possibly due to internet disruptions in the country. Some users on social media shared posts showing artifacts in some museums put away or wrapped in protective materials.
However, like dozens of other masterpieces in the museum, “The Painter and His Model” has spent virtually all of the 47 years since the Islamic Revolution shut away in TMOCA’s vaults, considered too inappropriate by the ayatollahs for display.
The museum’s core collection was assembled in the 1970s by Queen Farah Pahlavi, wife of then-shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Deeply passionate about art, the queen took advantage of the soaring prices of oil to bring to Tehran some of the best modern and contemporary art, acquiring works by Picasso, Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh and dozens more, including Jewish and Israeli artists such as Marc Chagall and Yaacov Agam, and gay ones like Francis Bacon. In 2018, the value of the collection was estimated at $3 billion.
The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art was inaugurated in 1977, only two years before the deeply unpopular shah was deposed and ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took power in 1979.
For several years following the coup, Western art was kept in the basement and the building was used to showcase revolutionary propaganda and honor the revolution’s “martyrs.” As reported in a 2015 Bloomberg article, the first exhibition displaying Western art was not held until 1999.
Since then, permanent and special exhibitions have featured many of the masterpieces, offering a glimpse of what Iran could have been, and at times, has attempted to be, despite its oppressive regime.
The 2025 exhibition “Picasso in Tehran” marked the first time “The Painter and His Model” was shown in public in the country, according to Bloomberg (in 2012, it was briefly loaned to the........