After the State Museums Berlin and the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, DC, Rome’s Maxxi museum is the latest institution to enter into talks with the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art to display its world-class collection of Modern art. According to the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera, the Tehran collection will go on show at the Rome museum in January 2017.
Giovanna Melandri, the president of the Fondazione Maxxi, signed the deal yesterday (29 November), during a two-day business forum between the two countries in the Iranian capital. The show will be organised by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, the former director of Rome’s Macro museum and a former curator at Maxxi, who is currently in Tehran selecting the works.
“I’m extremely happy with this deal: we have opened an extremely interesting communication line with Tehran which points to a renewed climate of cultural cooperation,” Melandri told Il Corriere della Sera.
Tehran’s collection of Modern art, which was assembled by the late Shah’s wife Farah Pahlavi and includes works by Bacon, Pollock and Warhol, among others, has not left the country since the Islamic revolution of 1979. It is said to be the best collection of Modern art held outside the West.