NYT: Lifting the Veil, Just a Bit, on West's Decadent Art
AiryanVich
Journal: Lifting the Veil, Just a Bit, on West's Decadent Art
By DOUGLAS JEHL
TEHRAN, Iran -- Propaganda placards around Tehran proclaim that a woman
hidden by Islamic dress codes is like "a pearl in a shell."
And, indeed, many pearls lie hidden by Iran's restrictive culture, such as a
government-owned art collection shut away since the Islamic revolution of 1979
in a climate-controlled vault deep in the bowels of the Museum of Contemporary
Art here.
More than 400 important paintings by Renoir, Monet, Pissarro and others are
stored in that basement, and though some have been taken upstairs for brief
public viewings, for nearly 20 years others have been deemed too provocative to
be seen.
To reflect President Mohammad Khatami's call for greater cultural openness, a
new director has won permission from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic
Guidance for a plan to put much more of the Western collection on regular
display.
But, he acknowledged in an interview here, some of the treasures that were
amassed in the waning days of Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi's rule will have to
remain locked behind a double set of thick steel doors.
"It comes down to morality," said the director, Ali Reza Semiazar, bound by a
principle that public art in Iran should imitate public life.
A good number of restrictions imposed on Iran after it was transformed into
an Islamic state have gradually been eased. Some women now allow a good bit of
hair to show from beneath their head scarves, something that not long ago would
have risked a public berating or worse. A few even dare display painted
toenails. Still, no woman yet dares to appear in public in Iran unless she is
covered from head to foot.
The same restriction applies to women portrayed on television, in newspapers
and magazines. And the trouble facing Semiazar is that the museum's collection
includes no small number of nudes.
Since it opened in 1978, the museum has served as a kind of mirror of change
in Iran. Built on a design that emulates the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in
New York, it was part of the shah's effort to establish Tehran as a cultural
center, and was filled with works acquired by curators in a worldwide buying
spree. In the year before the old government fell, it proudly displayed works
-- clothed and unclothed -- by modern masters from Picasso to Warhol.
But once the Islamic revolution made Western culture synonymous with a
cultural invasion, most of the Western works were locked away in the vault,
where the first image that greets a visitor is a portrait of Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, the late Iranian religious leader.
In the museum's many galleries, the works were replaced by kitsch
revolutionary art, sober Islamic calligraphy and revolving exhibitions, like a
collection of photography from around the world that is now on display.
True, an Alexander Calder mobile does hang in the alcove, and a sculpture
garden includes works by Henry Moore, Alberto Giacometti and Rene Magritte. But
only one small room in the museum is set aside for Western art, which can be
displayed no more than a handful at a time.
That limited space has meant that many among the museum's finest paintings,
including one by Max Ernst and another by Jackson Pollock, have not been put on
public display in more than a decade. And what Iranian art experts call the
finest of all -- a softly rendered Renoir portrait of a half-clothed young girl
-- is among those that have never appeared, and, by all accounts, is not likely
to emerge any time soon.
"It's a brilliant painting; it's wonderful; it's a masterpiece," Semiazar,
the museum director, said before escorting a visitor into the vault to see the
work, still in its heavy gilt frame but hung on a sliding metal rack. "It's
just an innocent young girl."
But, he said with evident regret, the standards he was obliged to enforce by
the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance meant that "it shouldn't be
shown."
Barring another revolution, at least a dozen others among the works that the
museum acquired in its pre-opening buying spree would seem to have even less of
a chance of seeing the light of day. Two are nudes in Francis Bacon's grotesque
style; another, "Intersection No. 3," by the painter John Kacere, is a Photo
Realistic depiction of the joining of a young girl's thighs.
In the last two decades only one among what Iranians see as the controversial
works has emerged into the international art market. The painting, a 1952 nude
by Willem de Kooning titled "Woman III," was quietly exchanged on the tarmac of
the Vienna airport four years ago for the remnants of a 16th-century book
containing miniature paintings detailing the ascension to the throne of Shah
Tahmasp of Persia. Both works had been valued at $20 million.
Only with special permission have the Iranian authorities allowed foreign
experts and students to view the otherwise off-limits prohibited works. That
has long been a source of frustration to Iranian art lovers; Mohammed Sohofi,
whom the new government replaced as museum director this year, said that during
a seven-year tenure he was variously pilloried among Iran's intellectuals as
being either a jailer or "a person out of the Middle Ages."
And because Iranian conservatives remain deeply suspicious both of Khatami's
government and its quest for cultural openness, some people in Iran say they
doubt that the museum will really carry out its plan to be a little bit more
bold.
But Semiazar said that his superiors are fully behind that plan, and that
dozens of Western works will be on display by early next year, including a
landscape by Monet, a still life by Gauguin and a portrait by Toulouse-Lautrec.
He has also promised soon to post on the Internet images of the entire
collection -- even those deemed unsuitable here. That way, he said, "people in
Paris can visit our Museum of Contemporary Art in the same way that I can visit
the Louvre."
Thursday, October 1, 1998
Copyright 1998 The New York Times
Scott Birch
and culture
out of Iran, and yet there, close to the core, they keep some of it's
finest
cultural artifacts ...
Thanks Airyanvich.
Scott.