Having a repressive regime hide modern art from public eyes for almost forty years is not what I would laud.
There is, however, a certain irony to the announcement that a collection assembled by Farah Diba Pahlavi and her cousin, Kamran Diba, which forms the basis of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art's modern collection that Kamran Diba directed and which was financed by Iran's oil wealth, will be exhibited in Berlin's Nationalgalerie from December 4, 2016 to February 26, 2017. (Afterward, the plan was for it to travel to the Smithsonian in D.C., if it all works out.)
The exhibit will make available to the viewing public key works by Claude Monet, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. They have been under wraps since the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
"Celebrated in Germany as a Coup," according to Art News, by which they meant, presumably, the prospective of the exhibit coming to Berlin, like much coverage of the proposed exhibit, omits histories and (intended) futures.
While publications spanning the political (and economic) spectrum, from Bloomberg News to Sueddeutsche Zeitung to Die Welt, reported on the exhibit, touting the collaboration as a sign of new cultural cooperation, a few things went unmentioned.
The coverage of the exhibit typically frames Germany or the U.S. as the more liberal (read politically, religiously, with regard to democratic values) saviors of Iran's current political and religious repression without ever mentioning the U.S.'s involvement a previous chapter of Iran's history. In 1953, the secret service of the U.S. and the U.K. jointly led an effort known as Operation Ajax, organized by the CIA's first director, Allen Dulles, to topple Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, who served from 1951 to 1953, weakening the parliament and restoring the throne. How democratic is that?
It was the first of three regime change operations orchestrated in this time under Dulles' leadership: in 1954, the CIA instigated a coup in Guatemala and in 1961, the CIA attempted to overthrow Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion.
Mossadegh, as Bahman Nirumand argued in Iran: Model of a Developing Nation or the Dictatorship of the Free World (1967), nationalized the British controlled oil industry, previously known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, then Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, then British Petroleum, now bp, and Standard Oil Company (now Chevron), Texaco (now a Chevron subsidiary). Toppling Mossadegh was intended to restore some of the financial flows.
Reza Pahlavi sought to use Iran's oil wealth to modernize the country through the White Revolution. Yet the White Revolution, as Ervand Abrahamian has argued in A History of Modern Iran, also sought to prevent a Red Revolution and planted the seeds for the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Widespread criticism existed that the wealth increasingly benefited some and not others, creating an increasingly economically bifurcated society. Farah Dibah's lavish collection could be read as a sign of this wealth, which, de facto, always carries within it, visible or invisible, the image of those upon whose backs the wealth rests.
When Reza Shah Pahlavi and Farah Diba Pahlavi visited West Berlin, students demonstrated the US and UK instigated coup and this economic inequality in two demonstrations on June 2, 1967: one took place in the afternoon at Schöneberg City Hall and a second took place in the early evening near the German Opera House where the Pahlavis had arrived to hear Mozart's The Magic Flute. At the latter demonstration, non-violent student protestor Benno Ohnesorg was fatally shot by a police officer. These events kicked off West Germany's 1968.
The current exhibit in Berlin is being touted as an effort to improve cultural and social relations between Germany and Iran. It is hard not to see it as a potential step in attempts to improve trade relations between the two countries.
The exhibit will close before June 2, 2017. It would have been a nice date for the opening or closing to mark the fifty-year anniversary celebration of Farah Diba Pahlavi's June 2, 1967 visit.