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    Iran: The Guardian of Hidden Art Treasures: A Treasure in The Cellar

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    NARU PM
    Firouz Shahbazi has been guarding one of the most valuable art collections in Iran for over 40 years in the basement of a museum in Tehran. The collection includes over 3,000 works by international artists like Pollock, Miro, and Lichtenstein that were acquired by the Shah's wife in the 1970s. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when anti-Western sentiment grew, Shahbazi protected the collection from being destroyed. As the former driver of the museum with no art background, he spent years self-educating to document and care for the multibillion dollar collection, which remains hidden away largely unseen due to the revolution.

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    Iran: The Guardian of Hidden Art Treasures: A Treasure in The Cellar

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    NARU PM
    68 views3 pages
    Firouz Shahbazi has been guarding one of the most valuable art collections in Iran for over 40 years in the basement of a museum in Tehran. The collection includes over 3,000 works by international artists like Pollock, Miro, and Lichtenstein that were acquired by the Shah's wife in the 1970s. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when anti-Western sentiment grew, Shahbazi protected the collection from being destroyed. As the former driver of the museum with no art background, he spent years self-educating to document and care for the multibillion dollar collection, which remains hidden away largely unseen due to the revolution.

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    muslim

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    Tehran Musium

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    Firouz Shahbazi has been guarding one of the most valuable art collections in Iran for over 40 years in the basement of a museum in Tehran. The collection includes over 3,000 works by international artists like Pollock, Miro, and Lichtenstein that were acquired by the Shah's wife in the 1970s. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when anti-Western sentiment grew, Shahbazi protected the collection from being destroyed. As the former driver of the museum with no art background, he spent years self-educating to document and care for the multibillion dollar collection, which remains hidden away largely unseen due to the revolution.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    68 views3 pages

    Iran: The Guardian of Hidden Art Treasures: A Treasure in The Cellar

    Uploaded by

    NARU PM
    Firouz Shahbazi has been guarding one of the most valuable art collections in Iran for over 40 years in the basement of a museum in Tehran. The collection includes over 3,000 works by international artists like Pollock, Miro, and Lichtenstein that were acquired by the Shah's wife in the 1970s. After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when anti-Western sentiment grew, Shahbazi protected the collection from being destroyed. As the former driver of the museum with no art background, he spent years self-educating to document and care for the multibillion dollar collection, which remains hidden away largely unseen due to the revolution.

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    Iran: The guardian of hidden art

    treasures

    Iran: The Guardian of Hidden Art Treasures |Picture: Picture: BR

    Firouz Shahbazi |Picture: Picture: BR


    Every day for nearly 40 years he has been walking down the long spiraling
    corridor into the basement of the museum, still under the Shah, he had
    been hired as a driver. But as a driver he had never worked. Everything
    changed with the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Firouz Shahbazi: "When the
    revolution was won on February 11, 1979, a few of the Revolutionary
    Committee, yes, that's what they said, I do not remember that exactly, they
    occupied the museum They all went home, only me kept them. "
    A treasure in the cellar
    Since then, he has been guarding one of the most valuable art collections in
    the cellar for 40 years. It was gathered before the revolution. As Tehran
    rapidly developed into a modern metropolis in the 1970s, the rise in oil
    prices made the city a hub of international commerce and lifestyles. The
    then Empress Farah Diba, avowed art lover, had far more than 3000
    international and Iranian works of art: paintings by Pollock, Miro, Roy
    Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, Munch, Chagall and many others.

    Jila Dejam |Picture: Picture: BR


    For this purpose, the museum was built especially as proof that Iran can
    play on an international level. The evening of October 13, 1977: Farah
    Diba's birthday and the opening of the museum in Tehran. Performance
    artists from around the world provide entertainment. Jila Dejam worked as a
    photographer in the museum. Her photos of the evening have never been
    shown before: "At the time it all seemed new to me and quite grotesque, not
    to mention the way it got to the ordinary people who had nothing to do with
    anything like that before, in the pictures that I had back then When I
    photographed, I suddenly realized what a great gulf existed between this
    avant-garde elite and the average citizen, which was more than the
    population at the time accepted. "
    Self-study documentation

    1979: Revolution of the Road |Picture: Picture: BR


    The Islamic revolution began in 1978. Among other things, it was a
    settlement of the population with the Shah and the imperial family, for their
    pomp, their wastefulness. From then on, everything connected with the
    West was despised, banished and destroyed. The refugees escaped in
    exile for the pictures they had just bought. What nobody suspected, one
    took care of them: Max Ernst, Monet, Rothko and Picasso, for Firouz
    Shahbazi, the images were initially no more than paint on screens: "Of
    course, I had no idea about art. I tried to get information from different
    books There was no Internet at the time, and for a little piece of information
    about a work, I had to search for days in the books, and I finally found them
    and had them documented in the museum. "
    Probably the most expensive copy in the basement: "Mural on Indian red
    ground" by Jackson Pollock. The value today is estimated at up to $ 250
    million. It is considered the main work of Pollock.
    Shahbazi, the former driver, took care of everything and kept one of the
    world's most valuable art collections for almost 40 years. Their total value is
    now estimated at up to three billion dollars.
    Gratitude for a vocation

    In the magazine |Picture: Picture: BR


    Firouz Shahbazi looks back: "God gave me the courage to carry out this
    task like that, tears of joy, I'm just happy, maybe I was not a good person
    for God, but God meant well with me, that I'm here today Excuse me, tears,
    I can not control myself, excuse me. "
    Firouz Shahbazi would have been happy if his "babies", as he calls the
    works of art, could have traveled to Germany. He tells us it would have
    been nice if the whole world could finally see these fantastic pictures.

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