NYT - TEHERAN JOURNAL: Lifting the Veil, Just a Bit, on West's Decadent Art
MrMojoMan
By DOUGLAS JEHL
TEHERAN, Iran -- Propaganda placards around Teheran 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."