Some of the world’s most expensive and rarely seen modern art, including works by the Americans Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, went on display Saturday in a major exhibition in Iran.
Some of the world’s most expensive and rarely seen modern art, including works by the Americans Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol, went on display Saturday in a major exhibition in Iran.
They are part of a collection bought in the 1970s by dealers acting for Farah, the wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who fled into exile in 1979, heralding the country’s Islamic revolution later that year.
Ever since the themes of many of the Western works have been considered too risque to be shown in Iran and they have spent much of the past 36 years languishing in storage in the basement of Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Among the 42 Western works featured in the museum’s three-month exhibition is Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground, completed in 1950 and considered one of his best drip paintings. Five years ago, experts at Christie’s said that, were it put on the market, it would fetch $250 million. Also featured is Warhol’s Suicide, a 1963 acrylic of a man leaping to his death from a building. A similar work from Warhol’s Death and Disaster series sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $105 million in 2013.
