Rothko's Sienna, Orange and Black on Dark Brown (1962) is in the Tehran collection. Photo: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images

Berlin will be the first foreign city to host the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in an exhibition that will feature both international and Iranian artists. It is scheduled to run from December to February 2017. 

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation announced yesterday (12 May) that it has signed a contract with the Tehran museum. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier welcomed the accord as “a signal of a new cultural and social openness that we want to use to broaden our dialogue with Iranian society, on controversial subjects too.”

Berlin’s culture leaders have yet to determine which museum will host the show. Though the content would be a match for the Neue Nationalgalerie near Potsdamer Platz, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s metal-and-glass construction is closed for a four-year renovation that began in 2015.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has one of the best collections of Western art outside Europe and the US, assembled under auspices of the last empress, Farah Pahlavi. It includes works by Picasso, Rothko, Kandinsky, Pollock, Warhol and Bacon acquired before the Iranian Revolution in 1979, as well as Iranian artists. After the Shah and his wife fled the country, the museum hid its treasures in a basement vault to save them from the revolutionary mob. They have only been exhibited again in the museum since 1999.

“No Western museum has so far been able to show these largely hidden Modern European and American works and juxtapose them with Iranian art,” says Hermann Parzinger, the president of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. “Berlin is about to experience an art sensation.”

The Art Newspaper previously reported that Germany was negotiating a loan fee of as much as $3 million to display the collection.

http://theartnewspaper.com/news/deal-sealed-to-exhibit-tehran-art-collection-in-berlin-/