The Warhol Khomeini Didn’t Burn

The Islamic Republic set out to purge Western influence. Yet in the vaults of a Tehran museum, it still holds one of the most valuable collections of modern art outside Europe and the United States — one whose exact worth not even the regime that owns it can name.

BENEATH TEHRAN, at the bottom of a spiral ramp modeled on Persian windcatchers, a vault holds a world the Islamic Republic believed it had expelled from Iranian history: Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Warhol, Bacon, Giacometti, Magritte have outlasted the revolution, the war with Iraq, and half a century of ideological condemnation. Some works have stayed invisible for decades, others judged too sensual to display without caution — but almost all of them have remained in Iran.

This collection says more than the strange story of an Islamic regime that owns nudes and pop art. It reveals a truth revolutions often learn too late: it is easier to overthrow a regime than to abolish value.

WHEN OIL BOUGHT MODERNITY

By the mid-1970s, Iran is rich: oil prices have surged, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi wants to remake his country by force. His wife, Farah Pahlavi — who studied architecture in Paris before becoming empress — wants this modernization written into the culture: the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by her cousin Kamran Diba, opens in October 1977.

The market hasn’t yet exploded, Tehran is awash in petrodollars, and Iran acquires dozens of major Western and Iranian works — less a hoard of prestigious names than an attempt to tell the story of modernity. Warhol paints the Shah, the empress, and Princess Ashraf: the Factory, his New York studio, and the Iranian monarchy seem to belong to the same elite, convinced of its own permanence.

Two years later, this world collapses.

THE REVOLUTION ENTERS THE MUSEUM

In 1979, the Islamic Republic sets out to erase the symbols of the old regime. The museum becomes a problem: naked bodies, American signatures, freedoms incompatible with the new official morality.

A month after the Shah’s fall, armed militiamen show up at the museum. The director, Mehdi Kowsar, has them sign an inventory of what was paid for every piece — hoping, he will explain later, from Rome, that an official document might discourage looting. Ten days later, he flies to Italy. He never comes back.

One serious mutilation is documented: a Warhol portrait of the empress, slashed in one of her former residences. The rest of the collection escapes that anger, moved into storage rather than destroyed. Francis Bacon’s triptych, Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants — two nude men on a bed — remains the museum’s property: too explicit to show.

And so a nearly unparalleled situation is born: the Iranian state owns works it can neither fully celebrate, nor freely display, nor destroy without mutilating its own heritage.

THOSE WHO GUARDED THE VAULT

With Kowsar gone, the guard doesn’t stop — it takes on a face. Firouz Shabazi Moghadam, who had joined the museum in 1977 knowing nothing about art, shuts himself in with the vault’s keys for nearly two years. Militiamen, then officials bearing official letters demanding this or that painting: he refuses every time, certain that nothing that left would ever come back. Decades later, in tears, he will tell Bloomberg Businessweek that he never again found that kind of courage anywhere else in his life. In front of that door, he says, he was “like a lion.”

In 2015, the Italian curator Germano Celant, working alongside Faryar Javaherian, becomes the first non-Iranian curator to organize an exhibition at the museum since the revolution. In 2024, the exhibition Eye to Eye shows the public more than 120 portraits, including works by Picasso, Warhol, and Bacon, extended three times running as the crowds kept coming. A ticket costs the equivalent of 14 U.S. cents.

Saving a collection, then, isn’t only about preventing its destruction: it’s also about keeping its memory alive and, when circumstances allow, its visibility.

FROM TWO TO TWELVE BILLION — ON PAPER

No one agrees on what the collection is worth: estimates run from two and a half to twelve billion dollars, proof that none of these figures has ever been tested by an actual sale. The Paul G. Allen collection, the largest private collection ever dispersed at auction, brought in only $1.622 billion at Christie’s in 2022 — less than the low end of the Iranian range, though a real sale and a theoretical estimate aren’t quite the same thing.

This wealth remains virtual: selling requires banks and insurers willing to get involved, which sanctions make explosive for any Iranian entity. The museum can’t liquidate a Pollock the way a bank sells a bond. The price protects the collection as much as it imprisons it.

A NUDE FOR THE BOOK OF KINGS

In 1994, Iran does part with one work: Willem de Kooning’s Woman III, a nude that had become almost impossible to show. On July 28, on the tarmac of Vienna’s airport, the British dealer Oliver Hoare — three years of negotiations behind him — hands Iranian officials the text, the binding, and 118 miniatures from the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, a 16th-century copy of the Persian national epic. In exchange, he receives the De Kooning canvas, then valued at $20 million — a female nude from the American avant-garde, traded for Persia’s Book of Kings.

The deal divides even the people who made it: Roxane Zand, formerly of Sotheby’s, sees a clash between two incommensurable systems of value; Hoare, for his part, judges that no De Kooning will ever match the standing, in the history of world culture, of a single miniature from the manuscript. The market will add its own measure: the canvas passes from David Geffen, who reportedly acquired it for around $20 million, to Steven Cohen, who buys it in 2006 for $137.5 million — seven times its value twelve years earlier. But that arithmetic only measures a loss if you agree to price a sacred manuscript in dollars — which is exactly what Tehran had refused to do: identity over price.

2024: AN OPENING THAT WASN’T ONE

Eye to Eye opens in October 2024, thirty-five years after Khomeini’s death — Iran still marked by the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, born in 2022, and by the election of Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist within the system. Women visitors appear with their hair uncovered, a disobedience that is tolerated but not acknowledged. Aida Zarrin tells the Associated Press of her disbelief at seeing paintings “always kept far from our eyes.”

Not a general liberalization, then, but a narrow cultural breathing space: inside a state museum, the Iranian public looks at depictions of the body and of freedom that the same state largely bans in public space — a state that agrees, for now, not to see everything.

THE ART THE REGIME OWNS BUT CANNOT CLAIM

The regime condemns the naked body, but protects the paintings that show it; fights America, but keeps its Warhols; disowns the order that built the museum, yet claims it as national heritage. None of this is irrational: a power can reject what an object represents without giving up what possessing it grants. The real question, then, is not why Tehran kept works of value — any state would have done the same — but why these particular ones, rather than converting them into ideologically neutral assets.

One exception exists, though, and it’s instructive: the only time Tehran had to actually choose, rather than let time do the work — the De Kooning nude, too explicit to remain even out of sight — it was ideology, not market value, that won. The collection, then, hasn’t survived half a century of revolution because power is helpless before the value of art. It has survived because, most of the time, power hasn’t had to look it in the eye.

The works have changed function without changing owners: they are no longer emblems of a triumphant Westernization, but the silent witnesses to what a revolution chooses not to resolve.

In the basements of Tehran, the old world never disappeared. It has stayed there, silent, never confronted — and that is precisely why, to this day, it remains beyond price.