Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, (Persian: موزه هنرهای معاصر تهران), also known as TMoCA, is among the largest art museums in Tehran and Iran. It has collections of more than 3,000 items that include 19th and 20th century's world-class European and American paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures. TMoCA also has one of the greatest collections of Iranian modern and contemporary art.
The museum was inaugurated by Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi (Persian: فرح پهلوی) in 1977, just two years before the 1979 Revolution. TMoCA is considered to have the most valuable collections of modern Western masterpieces outside Europe and North America.
According to Shahbanu Farah, the idea for the museum originated in a conversation, at a gallery opening in the 1970s, where the artist Iran Darroudi mentioned her desire for a permanent place to exhibit works. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art museum was supposed to be a place to show contemporary and modern Iranian artist alongside other international artists doing similar work.
The museum was designed by Iranian architect and cousin of the empress, Kamran Diba, who employed elements from traditional Persian architecture of Yazd, Kashan and other desert towns. Diba collaborated with architect Nader Ardalan during the design phase. It was built adjacent to Farah Park, renamed Laleh Park after the Islamic revolution, and was inaugurated in 1977. The building itself can be regarded as an example of contemporary art, in a style of an underground New York Guggenheim Museum. Most of the museum area is located underground with a circular walkway that spirals downwards with galleries branching outwards. Western sculptures by artists such as Ernst, Giacometti, Magritte and Moore can be found in the museum's gardens.
The art selection was done under the office of Shahbanu Farah with a budget from the National Iranian Oil Company. The Shahbanu personally met many of the artists whose work was part of the museum collection, including the Western artists Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Henry Moore, Paul Jenkins, Arnaldo Pomodoro. Some people involved in the process of selecting art were the Americans, Donna Stein and David Galloway, and Kamran Diba, the architect and director of the museum, and Karimpasha Bahadori, who was the Chief of Staff of the cabinet.
After the Iranian Revolution in 1979, the Western art was stored away in the museum's vault until 1999 when the first post-revolution exhibition was held of western art showing artists such as David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Now pieces of the Western art collection are shown for a few weeks every year but due to the current conservative nature of the Iranian establishment, most pieces are never be shown.
It is considered to have the most valuable collection of Western modern art outside Europe and the United States, a collection largely assembled by founding curators David Galloway and Donna Stein under the patronage of Farah Pahlavi. It is said that there is approximately £2.5 billion worth of modern art held at the museum. The museum hosts a revolving program of exhibitions and occasionally organizes exhibitions by local artists.
Collection curator Donna Stein later wrote a memoir, The Empress and I: How an Ancient Empire Collected, Rejected and Rediscovered Modern Art (2021), because she felt she was not properly credited for her role in curating this collection.
In 1977, Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi purchased expensive Western artwork in order to open the contemporary art museum. This was a controversial act due to rising social and economic inequalities. The authoritarian government was intolerant of the growing opposition which, only a few years later, would overthrow the monarchy in the Iranian revolution. A few art pieces did not survive the revolution including a public statue by Bahman Mohasses deemed un-Islamic and a 1977 Warhol painting, a portrait of the Shahbanu.
Le Monde art critic André Fermigier wrote an article in 1977 called "A museum for whom and for what?", "questioning the link between an Iranian child and a Picasso or a Pollock". Farah Pahlavi responded to this criticism, noting that Iranians can understand modern art, not all Iranians were living in remote villages, and this issue with modern art was not unlike one that had existed in France.
A touring exhibition was planned for autumn 2016 in Berlin, (Germany), consisting of a three-month tour of sixty artworks, half Western and half Iranian. The show was to run for three months in Berlin, then travel to the Maxxi Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome for display from March through August. However, the plan had to be postponed because the Iranian authorities had failed to allow the paintings to leave the country, also noting that, since the revolution, these paintings had not been shown in Iran. Finally, on 27 Dec 2016, a press release by Hermann Parzinger, the President of the organising committee, Berlin's Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (in German : Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin), cancelled the exhibition altogether.
In 2017 the TMoCA unexpectedly staged a show in Tehran which included the very works which were selected to travel to Europe: Berlin-Rome Travellers, Selected Works of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. It can be considered kind of an acte de résistance on the part of the museum director at the time, since, with the advent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, elected president of Iran in 2005, a harsh conservative wind has, to this day, blown away the relative openness and pragmatism of the Rafsanjani and Khatami eras.
This is a list of artists featured in the permanent collection at Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.