Letters to the editor | Donna Stein s book about the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is misleading and has inaccuracies theartnewspaper.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theartnewspaper.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Donna Stein s
The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected, and Rediscovered Modern Art (2021). Courtesy of Skira.
The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) has for decades been a beacon for the Iranian people. During the 1979 Islamic Revolution, a human shield formed around the building to protect the art inside. In 2016, when plans to privatize the museum were made public, protests filled the street.
After two years of renovations, TMoCA which houses the most valuable collection of Modern Western art outside Europe and North America swung open its doors again on January 28. But that’s not the only reason the museum is back in the limelight.
Thursday, 1 April, 2021 - 07:30
Farah Diba Pahlavi, left, and Donna Stein discussing a Hans Bellmer photograph during the museum’s installation of “Creative Photography: An Historical Survey,” October 1977.Credit.Jila Dejam, via Donna Stein Elaine Sciolino
On the edge of a vast park in Tehran sits a Neo-Brutalist structure the color of sand. Inside is one of the finest collections of modern Western art in the world.
You enter the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art through an atrium that spirals downward like an inverted version of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum. Photos of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s 1979 Revolution, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded him as the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader, glare down at you.