Lifting the veil: Behind the Iran curtain

Iran is divided between those seeking to embrace a Western way of life and the tradtionalists, writes Janine Di Giovanni

Deep in the basement of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, behind a door that opens with a spoked wheel like a bank vault, are some 2,000 paintings by artists such as Francis Bacon, René Magritte, Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin.

Iranian curators say the collection is estimated to be worth $5bn (€4.4bn), but only a select group of people have seen it since the 1979 revolution. A few days after I arrived in Tehran in February, I was given a rare opportunity: a private underground tour of the former shah’s art collection, one of the largest in the Middle East, housed in a building that the shah’s wife, Farah Pahlavi, erected in the 1970s.