The Warhol Khomeini Didn’t Burn

The Islamic Republic sought to drive out Western influence. Yet in the storerooms of a museum in Tehran, it preserves one of the most valuable collections of modern art outside Europe and the United States — a collection whose exact worth remains unknown, even to the regime that owns it.

BENEATH TEHRAN, at the end of a spiral ramp inspired by the wind towers of Persia, a storeroom preserves a world the Islamic Republic believed it had expelled from Iranian history: Picasso, Pollock, Rothko, Warhol, Bacon, Giacometti, Magritte. They survived the revolution, the war with Iraq, and half a century of ideological condemnation. Some works remained unseen for decades; others were deemed too sensual to be shown without caution — yet almost all of them stayed in Iran.

This collection tells us more than the strange story of an Islamic regime that owns nudes and Pop Art. It reveals a truth revolutions often discover too late: it is easier to overthrow a government than to abolish value.

WHEN OIL BOUGHT MODERNITY

In the mid-1970s, Iran was rich. Oil prices had soared, and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was determined to transform his country at breakneck speed. His wife, Farah Pahlavi — who had studied architecture in Paris before becoming empress — wanted to give that modernization a cultural form. Designed by her cousin Kamran Diba, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art opened in October 1977.

The market had not yet exploded, Tehran had petrodollars to spend, and Iran acquired dozens of major Western and Iranian works — less a collection of illustrious names than an attempt to tell the story of modernity. Warhol portrayed the Shah, the empress, and Princess Ashraf. The Factory, his New York studio, and the Iranian monarchy appeared to belong to the same elite, confident in its permanence.

The museum also preserved another modernity, one less familiar outside Iran: that of Parviz Tanavoli, Charles Hossein Zenderoudi, Faramarz Pilaram, and Bahman Mohasses. The Saqqakhaneh movement drew on calligraphy, votive objects, and popular Shiite imagery to create a distinctly Iranian contemporary language. Two modernities thus coexisted in the same storerooms: one imported by the monarchy, the other born from the transformation of local forms.

Two years later, that world collapsed.

THE REVOLUTION ENTERS THE MUSEUM

In 1979, the Islamic Republic set about erasing the symbols of the old regime. The museum immediately became a problem: nude bodies, American signatures, forms of freedom incompatible with the new morality.

One month after the Shah’s fall, armed militiamen appeared at the museum. The director, Mehdi Kowsar, had them sign an inventory listing the price paid for each work — hoping, as he would later explain from Rome, that an official document might discourage looting. Ten days later, he flew to Italy. He never returned.

One major act of vandalism is documented: a portrait of the empress by Warhol was slashed in one of her residences. Most of the museum’s collection escaped that fury, placed in storage rather than destroyed. Francis Bacon’s triptych Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendants — two naked men stretched out on a bed — thus remained the property of the museum, too delicate to be displayed.

A situation almost without precedent was born: the Iranian state owned works it could neither celebrate, nor freely exhibit, nor destroy without mutilating its own heritage.

THOSE WHO GUARDED THE STOREROOMS

After Kowsar left, the protection of the collection did not end. It acquired a face.

Firouz Shabazi Moghadam had joined the museum in 1977 knowing nothing about art. After the revolution, he shut himself away with the keys to the storerooms for nearly two years. Militiamen came, followed by officials carrying letters demanding this or that painting. Each time, he refused, convinced that nothing taken out would ever return.

Decades later, in tears, he told Bloomberg Businessweek that he had never again found such courage anywhere else in his life. Before that door, he said, he became “like a lion.”

In 2015, the Italian curator Germano Celant, together with Faryar Javaherian, became the first non-Iranian curator to organize an exhibition at the museum since the revolution. In 2024, the exhibition Eye to Eye presented more than 120 portraits by Iranian and international artists, including Picasso, Warhol, and Bacon, and was extended three times in response to public demand. Admission cost the equivalent of 14 US cents.

Saving a collection, then, does not simply mean preventing its destruction. It also means preserving its memory and, when circumstances allow, restoring its visibility.

FROM TWO TO TWELVE BILLION — ON PAPER

No one agrees on the value of the collection. Estimates range from $2.5 billion to $12 billion, proof that no figure has ever been tested in a genuine transaction. The Paul G. Allen collection, the largest private collection ever dispersed at auction, brought in just $1.622 billion at Christie’s in 2022 — less than the lowest estimate for the Iranian collection, even if an actual sale cannot be compared directly with a theoretical valuation.

That wealth remains virtual. Selling would require banks and insurers willing to take part, something sanctions make highly explosive for any Iranian entity. The museum cannot 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 nevertheless parted with one work: Willem de Kooning’s Woman III, a nude that had become virtually impossible to exhibit.

On July 28, on the tarmac at Vienna airport, the British dealer Oliver Hoare — after three years of negotiations — handed Iranian officials the text, binding, and 118 miniatures of the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, a sixteenth-century copy of the Persian national epic. In return, he received the De Kooning, then valued at $20 million — a female body from the American avant-garde exchanged for the Persian Book of Kings.

The deal divided even those who had helped arrange it. Roxane Zand of Sotheby’s saw it as a conflict between two incommensurable systems of value. Hoare, for his part, argued that no De Kooning could ever equal the status of even a single miniature from the manuscript.

The market later added its own measure. The painting passed from David Geffen, who is believed to have acquired it for around $20 million, to Steven Cohen, who bought it in 2006 for $137.5 million — seven times its value twelve years earlier.

But that arithmetic measures a loss only if one accepts that a sacred manuscript should be valued in dollars, which Tehran had precisely refused to do: identity against price.

2024: AN OPENING THAT WAS NOT AN OPENING

Eye to Eye opened in October 2024, thirty-five years after Khomeini’s death, with Iran still marked by the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement that began in 2022, and by the election of Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist within the system.

Some women visitors appeared with their hair uncovered, an act of disobedience tolerated but not acknowledged. Aida Zarrin told the Associated Press of her disbelief at seeing paintings that had been “kept from our eyes for so long.”

In March 2025, a Picasso exhibition extended this controlled breathing space: sixty-six works by the artist were shown in Tehran, including the twenty-six aquatints of La Tauromaquia, never before exhibited in Iran.

This was not a general liberalization, but a narrow cultural respite. In a state museum, the Iranian public could contemplate representations of the body and of freedom that the same state largely forbids in public space.

For a moment, the authorities agreed not to see everything.

THE ART THE REGIME OWNS BUT CANNOT MAKE ITS OWN

The regime condemns the naked body, yet protects the paintings that show it; it opposes America, yet keeps its Warhols; it rejects the order that built the museum, yet claims the museum as part of the national heritage.

There is nothing irrational in this. A state may reject what an object represents without surrendering what possession of that object confers.

The real question, then, is not why Tehran kept works of great value — any state might have done the same — but why it kept precisely these works, rather than converting them into ideologically neutral assets.

There is, however, one instructive exception. The only time Tehran had to choose rather than let time and inertia decide — the De Kooning nude, too explicit to remain even invisibly — ideology, not market value, prevailed.

The collection therefore did not survive half a century of revolution because power is helpless before the value of art. It survived because, most of the time, the regime was never forced to confront it directly.

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

In the basements of Tehran, the old world never disappeared.

It remained there, silent and unconfronted — and that is precisely why, even today, it remains beyond price.