From Persia with love: How an Empress transformed Iran with art
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As a young queen, Pahlavi’s teenage fascination with building and architecture matured into a keen appreciation of fine art. She immersed herself in the local arts scene, lending her imperial imprimatur to events such as 1962’s Tehran Biennale, and not only supported the work of young Iranian painters and sculptors, but also displayed it in the royal palaces. In the late 1960s, she helped found the Shiraz Arts Festival for music, dance, drama, poetry and film, a bohemian fete intended to put Iran on the cultural map. In 1971, to mark the 2500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great, she staged a gala attended by Monaco’s Princess Grace and Prince Rainier, Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito and the Philippines’ Imelda Marcos. So over-indulgent were the celebrations, some historians believe they provided a jewel-encrusted seedbed for the Iranian revolution.
Then there were the museums she created: to house Persian carpets, pre-Islamic ceramics, 19th-century Iranian paintings, Luristan bronzes and, what would become her crowning achievement, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. Originally, the museum was intended as a showcase for Iranian artists, but with the Shah’s regime awash with cash following the doubling of oil prices in 1973, Pahlavi’s artistic ambitions ballooned. Why not also make it the home to some of the world’s greatest modern and contemporary works, pieces she had long admired from afar? “It’s now or never to buy some of these things,” she told her husband, as she spearheaded a spending spree on the international art market, snapping up works by Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Paul Gauguin, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Miró, Edvard Munch, Edward Hopper, René Magritte and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a triptych by Francis Bacon and one of Jackson Pollock’s most celebrated drip-paintings, Mural on Indian Red Ground. (She also tried to acquire Pollock’s Blue Poles, but the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, with the backing of PM Gough Whitlam, outbid her.)
As well as being a patron, she visited and befriended artists: Henry Moore, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall. At a White House gala thrown by US president Gerald Ford, she met Andy Warhol, although the pop artist tried to avoid her for much of the evening, hurriedly moving from one stately room to another, through fear she would ask him to dance. “He wondered why this woman was running after him,” she says, laughing. Eventually she cornered him, and the conversation that followed persuaded Warhol to visit Iran in 1976. In between pool parties and caviar binges at the Tehran Intercontinental, Warhol took a portrait of the Empress that proved such a hit in the royal household that he returned to photograph the Shah.
Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art was inaugurated in 1977, with parkland once used by the military now dotted with sculptures by Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti, and a Brutalist building dubbed an “underground Guggenheim” because of its spiral ramp that took visitors on a descent into its bowels. Here was hung what’s been called “the best modern art collection you have never heard of”: 200 or so works with a current-day value conservatively estimated at well over $US3 billion.
Less than two years later, the Shah was deposed in the Islamic Revolution, and the couple were forced into exile – in Egypt, Morocco, The Bahamas, Mexico and, briefly, the US, where president Jimmy Carter’s decision to allow the Shah to receive cancer treatment prompted the seizure of 52 American diplomats and staff at the US embassy in Tehran. “It was very, very hard to leave, especially when I saw the tears in the eyes of my husband,” Pahlavi remembers. “When you leave your land, your love, your belongings, it’s very sad. But I didn’t want to be negative. I didn’t want to lose my hope and positivity.” On the plane as they jetted towards Egypt, she immediately began writing morale-boosting letters to friends and supporters left behind.
Article source: http://smh.com.au/nsw/young-teen-received-more-than-600-emails-from-34yearold-posing-as-15yearold-20171013-gz0kx0.html
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