Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art opened a rare exhibition of American Pop art this week, displaying six works by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, and James Rosenquist — artists whose vivid, anti-war imagery stands in stark contrast to the anti-American billboards that line the city’s streets. The show, titled “Art and War,” opened amid a fragile ceasefire in the months-long conflict between Iran and the United States, the Associated Press reported.
The exhibit draws from a collection of Western modern art amassed in the 1970s by Farah Pahlavi, then empress and wife of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, when Iran was the closest U.S. ally in the region and booming oil prices filled state coffers. The museum, built by the shah’s government, acquired masterpieces of Cubist, Surrealist, Impressionist, Abstract and Pop art — works by Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, and David Hockney among them. Just two years after the museum opened, however, the shah was ousted in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the collection was packed into a vault for decades to avoid offending Islamic values or appearing to cater to Western sensibilities.
Since 2012, the museum has occasionally brought pieces out for temporary displays. The trove is believed to be worth several billion dollars, but museum officials have resisted selling it, even as Iran struggles under Western sanctions. In 1994, the country traded a Willem de Kooning painting for a prized manuscript of the Persian epic “Shahnameh” from an American foundation.
The current exhibition was conceived as a direct response to the conflict, said Reza Dabirinezhad, the museum’s director. “We wanted the exhibit to respond to the events unfolding around it,” he told Iran’s semiofficial ISNA news agency. The six works chosen “were either shaped by the experience of war or created as reactions to wars.” The museum operates under the authority of the Culture Ministry.
Among the pieces on view is James Rosenquist’s “F-111,” a collage from the Vietnam War era that critiques the military‑industrial complex with images of a fighter‑plane fuselage, a nuclear mushroom cloud, and a child’s face. Nearby hangs Roy Lichtenstein’s “Brattata,” a comic‑book‑style panel showing a pilot shooting down an enemy aircraft.
“American artists have always had a really interesting way of ridiculing war, and that’s always fascinated me in their work,” said Ghazaleh Jahanbin, a Tehran artist visiting the show. “Maybe part of it, I don’t know, comes from their geographical distance from war itself.”
Mohammad Sadegh Abbasi, another visitor, said some of the images reminded him of scenes he witnessed during recent bombardments. “This state of being undecided leaves you dazed and confused, everything is up in the air,” he said of the ceasefire’s uncertainty. “I hope everything ends well soon and we get a secure and calm life.”
Museums and many other cultural activities across Iran shut down during the weeks of U.S.–Israeli bombardment that preceded the April ceasefire. The pause allowed a few institutions to reopen, though Dabirinezhad said only a small number of works were put on display in case hostilities resume and the pieces must be rushed back to safe storage. For art lovers like Jahanbin, the reopening was a relief: “A couple of weeks ago I was talking with my friends and everybody was talking about how much they missed visiting museums.”
The six works will remain on view until May 10, the director said, with new pieces related to the theme coming out of the vault each week.