Warhol, Pollock, Rothko on rare display in Tehran

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 today 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 Iran's Islamic revolution later that year.
Ever since the themes of many of the Western works have been considered too risque to be publicly shown and 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 USD 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 USD 105 million in 2013.

The American artist Mark Rothko's "Sienna Orange and Black on Dark Brown" oil on canvas and Irish-born British painter Francis Bacon's "Reclining Man with Sculpture" are also on show.

They are part of a joint exhibition also featuring 130 works by famed Iranian artist Farideh Lashai. A painter, writer, translator and visual artist, she died in 2013.
Iran's Culture Minister Ali Jannati attended a preview last night in a demonstration of official support from President Hassan Rouhani's government.
Jannati told AFP that the Islamic republic's recent nuclear deal with world powers had opened up potential for international cooperation in art as well as business and other fields.
"This is a first step and we hope to have more mutual cooperation to showcase outstanding Iranian artists as well as displaying more works from our foreign art collection," he said.

The international works went underground after Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini railed against "Westoxification", denouncing Western moral and sexual depravity which he said had infected the Islamic world.
Many films were banned from cinemas in Iran as was music and many books.
The Tehran museum did not hold a major exhibition of foreign art until 1999, a decade after Khomeini's death.