ABOVE: detail from Javad Hamidi’s Still Life (1990), part of the permanent collection at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The Museum is now showing its substantial collection of Western modern art for the first time since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has opened a major show of Western modern art, Reuters is reporting today. In most cases, this is the first time the Iranian museum will be showing these parts of its permanent collection in 26 years, when the Islamic revolt against the Shah forced the museum of stash its substantial cache of European and North American art in its vaults. The show, called “Modern Art Movement” includes works from 1870 up to the late 1980s, by artists such as Picasso, Magritte, van Gogh, Miro, Dali, Warhol, Pollock, and others.

We’d love to be able to point you to the Tehran MoCA’s website so you can see what an impressive show this is, but it is experiencing technical difficulties at the moment, hopefully of the “someone spilled Pepsi on the server” variety, and not the “museum employees have been detained pending religious trial” kind. The Reuters story quotes a British expert who says that the Tehran collection is “clearly the most important collection of the art of this period outside of Western Europe and North America,” so this is a big deal on several levels.

LINK: Reuters > Iran puts rarely-seen Western art on display