FARAH DIBA PAHLAVI: AN EXILE FROM A COLLECTION

The art newspaper

By Myrna Ayad

Thirty-seven years after her husband, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919-80), was deposed and the Islamic Republic of Iran was founded, the former empress Farah Diba Pahlavi is in the news again, as Iran’s celebrated Western collection of Modern art, amassed for the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) in the 1970s under her directorship, is unveiled to international eyes. Last November, Germano Celant and Faryar Javaherian curated a retrospective of the work of the Iranian artist Farideh Lashai that was peppered with prized pieces from TMoCA’s collection. The works, including those by Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Marc Chagall, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, will travel to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin next year, marking the first time that the museum’s collection has left Tehran. Pahlavi, who was responsible for founding numerous cultural institutions and still takes an active interest in Iranian artists, now lives between Washington D.C. and Paris and has not returned to Iran since 1979.

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