page_title: Farah Pahlavi
section_title: Contemporary art
hierarchical_section_title: Farah Pahlavi / Contributions to art and culture / Contemporary art
caption_attribution_description: English: Farah Pahlavi in Jame Mosque of Sabzevar 1974-11-30 فارسی: شهبانو فرح در مسجد جامع سبزوار، ۱۳۵۳/۹/۹
context_page_description: Farah Pahlavi is the widow of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and was the Shahbanu of Iran.
  Farah was born into a prosperous family, whose fortunes were diminished after her father's early death. While studying architecture in Paris, she was introduced to the Shah at the Iranian Embassy, and they were married in December 1959. The Shah's first two marriages had not produced a son, necessary for the succession, so there was great rejoicing at the birth of Crown Prince Reza the following October. Farah was then free to pursue interests other than domestic duties, though she was not allowed a political role. She worked for many charities, and founded Iran's first American-style university, enabling more women to become students. She also facilitated the buying-back of Iranian antiquities from museums abroad.
  By 1978, there were clear signs of impending revolution, and the Imperial couple left the country in January 1979 under a death sentence. For this reason, most countries were reluctant to harbour them, President Sadat’s Egypt being an exception. But the Shah's health was failing, and he died in July 1980.
context_section_description: Aside from building a collection of historic Iranian artifacts, the Empress also expressed interest in acquiring contemporary Western and Iranian art. To this end, she put her significant patronage behind the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The fruits of her work in founding and expanding that institution are perhaps the Empress' most enduring cultural legacy to the people of Iran.
  Using funds allocated from the Government, the Empress took advantage of a somewhat depressed art market of the 1970s to purchase several important works of Western art. Under her guidance, the Museum acquired nearly 150 works by such artists as Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, George Grosz, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Roy Lichtenstein. Today, the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is widely considered to be one of the most significant outside Europe and the United States. According to Parviz Tanavoli, a modern Iranian sculptor and a former Cultural Adviser to the Empress, that the impressive collection was amassed for "tens, not hundreds, of millions of dollars". Today, the value of these holdings are conservatively estimated to be near US$2.8 billion.
  The collection created a conundrum for the anti-western Islamic Republic which took power after the fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1979. Although politically the fundamentalist government rejected Western influence in Iran, the Western art collection amassed by the Empress was retained, most likely due to its enormous value. It was, nevertheless, not publicly displayed and spent nearly two decades in storage in the vaults of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. This caused much speculation as to the fate of the artwork which was only put to rest after a large portion of the collection was briefly seen again in an exhibition that took place in Tehran during September 2005.
caption: Farah Pahlavi in Jame Mosque of Sabzevar
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