Berlin’s cultural leaders have announced that an exhibition of works drawn from the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) will open this winter at the Gemäldegalerie (4 December-26 February 2017), which houses the city’s collection of Old Master paintings.
The German capital will become the first foreign city to host the collection, which is considered one of the best holdings of Western art outside the US and Europe. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation announced in May that it had signed a contract with TMoCA.
The exhibition will include more than 60 major Modern works by US and European artists such as Francis Bacon, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Key 20th-century Iranian artists, including Faramarz Pilaram, Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam and Behjat Sadr, will also feature in the show, which is due to travel to Rome’s museum of Modern art, MaXXI, after Berlin.
In the second half of the 1970s, the late shah’s wife, Farah Pahlavi, championed the acquisition of Modern art from the West and backed the founding of the Tehran museum. After the couple fled the country during the 1979 revolution, the museum hid its Modern art treasures in a basement vault. They were returned to public view 20 years later in 1999, but most of the works have not travelled outside the country.
The Art Newspaper has previously reported that Germany was negotiating a loan fee of as much as $3m to display the collection. The Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, which was among the first to start talks with Tehran, ended negotiations to borrow the entire Farah Pahlavi collection when the potential loan fee reached $1m.