An exhibition of artworks from Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art that was due to open in Berlin next month has been indefinitely postponed because the Iranian authorities have failed to allow the paintings to leave the country.

Ticket sales for the event – which had been hailed as a sign of a deepening cultural dialogue between Iran and the west – have now been suspended.

About 60 works from the TMoCA were expected to be to be received in Germany next week for the opening of the eagerly-awaited Tehran Collection at Berlin’s Gemälde Galerie.



Spanning French impressionism to American pop art and celebrated as the most impressive collection of modern art anywhere outside Europe and the US, the exhibition was scheduled to move to Rome’s Maxxi Museum of Modern Art in February.

Jackson Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground. Photograph: Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art | © Pollock-Krasner Foundation / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016

Among the paintings due to be displayed was Jackson Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground, estimated to be worth in excess of £200m, and Francis Bacon’s 1968 triptych Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants. Thirty Iranian artworks also due to go on show include works by Faramarz Pilaram, Behjat Sadr and Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam.

The apparent refusal of Iranian authorities to release the collection has been met with disappointment and bewilderment in Berlin, where cultural heads and diplomats had been working to pull off the deal for years.



“The opening on 4 December will definitely not be possible,” said a spokeswoman for the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) who negotiated the loan. “We are ready and waiting to open the exhibition, but the paintings are still in Tehran.

“We had signed contracts with the TMoCA and relations are on a good footing, but we are told someone needs to give the green light for the artworks to leave Tehran, and that signature is still missing, though the current signals we’re getting indicate we’ll get them soon.”

While Germany’s foreign ministry, whose cultural ambassadors have been active behind the scenes, has signalled it is prepared to be patient, Hermann Parzinger, president of the SPK said the Iranians needed to solve the impasse soon. “We will not postpone this three, four, five times,” he told Die Zeit. “There are limits.”

Germany’s foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had celebrated the cultural agreement with Iran – for which Germany has reportedly paid €2.8m said to cover insurance and transport costs – as proof of the success of German cultural diplomacy, or what he has called “reflective power”, arguing it helped to strengthen relations in the wake of the recent but extremely fragile nuclear deal.

The art works were purchased during the oil boom of the 1970s under the direction of Farah Diba Pahlavi, the wife of the last Iranian shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Francis Bacon’s painting ‘Two Figures Lying on a Bed with Attendant’ (1968) displayed at the Modern Art Movement exhibition at TMoCA. Photograph: Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty Images

It includes works by Mark Rothko, Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Marcel Duchamp and Edgar Degas, many of which have not been seen outside Tehran for four decades.

But just two years after the completion of the TMoCA – which was built to house them – the Islamic Revolution of 1979 forced the end of the shah’s regime and the collection was transferred into storage, where much of it has sat gathering dust ever since.

Pahlavi, who lives in exile in the US and Paris, had welcomed news of the exhibition, saying she planned to attend and hoped sales from it might go towards restoring the museum as well as works in the collection.

“I hope this happens. I’ve heard that some works aren’t in good condition ... I hope now with everyone talking about this museum they’ll take care of it,” she told The Art Newspaper.

But in Tehran, news that the TMoCA was to send parts of its collection abroad on loan has annoyed many artists. For years they have complained about the secrecy surrounding the works, many of which have been deemed un-Islamic, often due to nude or gay subject matter.

Leili Golestan, a prominent gallery owner based in Tehran, told the Guardian it was still unclear which pictures were destined for Berlin.

“Even now we still don’t know which works are meant to be sent [to Berlin],” she said. “Why so much secrecy? The authorities have not been transparent about this at all.”

Ali Amini Najafi, an Iranian art expert based in Germany, said it was understandable that Iranian artists were concerned. “They don’t want these works to be sent abroad without transparency,” he said.

In Germany too, concern has been raised that the authenticity of the paintings cannot be verified. Some suspect a number of the paintings had been offered to auction houses in the past 40 years, but then apparently found their way back into the collection.

Andy Warhol’s ‘the American Indian’ at TMoCA. Photograph: © Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art

The SPK has been keen to stress that its curators have investigated both the provenance – in particular to rule out that none of the paintings were confiscated from Jewish families by the Nazis – and the authenticity of the paintings.

The SPK’s spokeswoman said: “Our curators were in Iran and were able to inspect the artworks closely. They are as sure as they can be that there are no forgeries amongst them.”

Anxiety over the collection being broken up when it comes to Berlin hark back to 1994 when the museum exchanged one of its paintings – Woman III, by the Dutch-American expressionist Willem de Kooning – for a rare illuminated volume of Shahnameh, an ancient Persian poetry book, which belonged to the American art collector Arthur Houghton. The swap infuriated many in Iran and has not been forgotten.

Hossein Khosrojerdi, a London-based Iranian artist who has advised TMoCA in the past, said the secrecy about the works had only exacerbated the concerns of forgeries or swaps. “The problem is people in Iran don’t have enough information about the works in the museum’s collection,” he said.

The collection has rarely been shown to Iranians, though in 2012 a number of the works were removed from storage and displayed in a show that was heavily censored but hugely popular. Cultural observers in Germany have expressed concern that in the event of a Berlin show, a European audience would have greater access to the works than Iranians.

But a diplomat closely involved in the art deal said the hope was that showing them outside Iran would also make the artworks more accessible when they returned to Tehran.

“By showing the pictures here, we’ll increase the chance that they can be shown in Tehran one day,” the diplomat said.

In the months running up to the scheduled opening it was the German side which nearly pulled the plug on the project after it was revealed that the head of the TMoCA, Majid Mollanoroozi, had presented prizes in a competition of caricatures on the Holocaust. He was immediately removed from the project on the request of the German government.

“It proved to us just how precarious the situation is and how the doors can suddenly shut on us,” the diplomat said. “I for one won’t believe the exhibition is actually happening until I see the pictures hanging on the wall”.