Iran’s impressive collection of Western art

DAYS BEFORE Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric, won Iran’s presidential election in June, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art reopened to the public after a long refurbishment. It made for a strange juxtaposition. Mr Raisi celebrates the decline of American influence; his culture minister rails against “the deviation and secularism” of Iran’s art scene. Yet the museum welcomed back visitors with a retrospective of Andy Warhol, the American pop-artist. Fashionable men and -clad women gazed at portraits of Marilyn Monroe, the blonde seductress, and a mocking rendition of Mao Zedong, the Chinese dictator (pictured, from an old exhibition).Warhol was a favourite of Farah Pahlavi, wife of Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, the late shah. The old regime built the museum in part to enhance Iran’s stature. When it opened in 1977 it showed works by Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Mark Rothko, bought under Mrs Pahlavi’s supervision during Iran’s oil boom.