"It is the only such collection outside the Western world," explained Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art curator Ali-Reza Samiazar as the 50-day exhibition opened.
The 188 paintings on display were mostly picked up by former Queen Farah Pahlavi, who used a team of experts to tour Western auctions and spend the national budget for cultural activities.
Since the 1979 Islamic revolution, not a single piece of artwork has been added to the collection - which ranges from surrealism, minimalism, abstract expressionism, cubism, op art and pop art.
"The authorities would not allocate a budget as they think it's all a waste," Samiazar said, explaining that most of the paintings have been hidden in the museum's vaults given the limited space and security that the museum can provide.
Only sculptures including works by existentialist-surrealist artist Alberto Giacometti and abstract-modernist Henry Moore are on year-round permanent display.
"It's a feast for the eyes. I didn't know we had so many," exclaimed Mojdeh Hamidi, a young Iranian student seen admiring The Matador by Spanish painter Juan Miro.
But two paintings are staying under lock and key for the exhibition: Gabriel by Auguste Renoir and The Golden Age by Andre Derain - both feature nudity and are therefore "un-Islamic".
Many Iranian hardliners have argued that such a collection is of little value to the Islamic Republic, and that means that they could soon be sent back into storage.
The only trade from the collection came in 1992 when Iran exchanged a work by Dutch-born abstract-expressionist Willem de Kooning for several pages of a manuscript of the tenth-century Persian epic, the Shahnameh ('Book of Kings').
Appointed by the reformist government in 1998, Samiazar said that it was unlikely that hardliners in new President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's administration would try to sell off any of the works.
This, he said, "would raise a huge international and political scandal".
"In my first two years I was often approached by brokers, who had heard Iran is not interested in this collection. But nothing has been sold," he said.
Since 1998 the museum has also lent 16 of its works to foreign exhibitions and one of its treasured paintings, Reclining Man and the Sculpture by Francis Bacon, is currently on display in Britain.
With hardliners now moving into Iran's institutions, Samiazar said that the future for Iranian artists and art-lovers was uncertain. The Islamic republic's new management, he said, "are the ones who were critical of our open doors and interactive policies".
Samiazar said that he was soon likely to be replaced following the change in government - hardly surprising given his personal taste in art.
Jackson Pollack's Mural on Indian Red Ground is Samiazar's favorite, because "this wild painting perfectly depicts defying boundaries, free spirit and individualism in American action painting".
© 2005 Agence France-Presse
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