Warhol in Tehran: Iranians flock to American pop art exhibit

Iranians at Andy Warhol's portraits of Mick Jagger in Tehran's Museum of modern art February 12. [Iran's reformers appealed on Saturday to two of their top constituencies, promising expanded rights for women and greater freedom for students ahead of next week's parliamentary polls. More than 6,000 candidates will compete for 290 seats in the expanded parliament when voters cast their ballots on February 18. ]

Warhol in Tehran: Iranians flock to American pop art exhibit

PBS-

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iranian hard-liners, now back at the helm of the country, may regularly rail against the poisoning of Islamic society by Western culture, but in Tehran, Iranians are flocking to the contemporary art museum to marvel at American pop artist Andy Warhol’s iconic soup cans.

The circular floors of the Iranian capital’s Museum of Contemporary Art display a sprawling line-up of 18 classic Warhol works, recognizable at first glance: silk-screen portraits of Communist China’s founding leader Mao Zedong and Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe, paintings of Campbell Soup cans, and a vintage print of former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy.

The exhibit, simply named A Review of Andy Warhol’s Works, first opened in June and closes on Sunday. The still-surging coronavirus, which has killed more people in Iran than any other country in the Middle East, forced the museum to close its doors to Warhol fans for a few weeks in August.

“I love this painting,” gushed 46-year-old Fatemeh Rezaee, taking in the colored ink of Marilyn Monroe’s face, which Warhol produced in 1962 soon after the actress killed herself. “By looking at it, I visualized Marilyn Monroe’s life story in my head. It makes the concept of death really tangible for me.”

Rezaee, a retired teacher in a loose silk hijab, was so enthralled by the exhibit that she flew all the way from her home in the southern city of Shiraz to see it — twice.

She went on: “His selection of colors is outstanding and to me conveys a combination of feelings such as melancholy and mortality.”

Warhol’s works are among a permanent art collection worth billions of dollars kept in the Tehran museum vault. As oil boomed during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country acquired thousands of pieces, including Monets, Picassos, and Jackson Pollocks, before the 1979 Islamic Revolution ousted the pro-Western monarchy and vaulted Shiite clerics to power.