The Most Important Picasso You Cannot See Is in Iran^1,2. With that provocative headline, Felix Salmon reflects at Bloomberg about how a buried masterpiece in Tehran exposes the way modern war, sanctions and geopolitics can quietly turn great art into a hostage of history.

The Painter and his Model is a recurring theme in the work of Pablo Picasso¹. He dedicated much of his career to exploring the female figure and the relationship between the muse (model) and the creator. These works typically depict the creative process, the intimate and complex relationship between the artist, his muse, with the painter observing or capturing the model in the studio.

The last decade of Picasso’s life is marked by a considerable tour de force when he again took up the theme of El Pintor y la Modelo with great enthusiasm and created one of his most prolific series, generating over 150 paintings. Picasso was already an octogenarian, but his creative process continued its compulsive development, taking the form of intensive almost obsessive production, with the painter completing two canvases or more a day.

The Painter and his model (1927) is a magnum opus of Picasso’s Surrealist period. It arrived in Tehran thanks to Farah Pahlavi, the wife of the Shah of Iran. Due to the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, oil prices quadrupled, hurting the US economy but bringing huge profits to Iran.

The Shahbanu, as she was known, was an art lover who wanted to establish her country as “a cultural vanguard,” (…) She built the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, or TMoCA, and spent years seeking out pieces to fill it with. Think of it as a particularly sophisticated oil trade: turning barrels of oil into oils on canvas.

Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA)² was inaugurated by Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi in 1977, just two years before the 1979 Revolution. TMoCA is considered to have the most valuable collections of modern Western masterpieces outside Europe and North America: collections of more than 3,000 items that include 19th and 20th-century’s world-class European and American paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures. The musseum also has one of the greatest collections of Iranian modern and contemporary art.

Iran stopped buying art for TMoCA after the 1979 revolution, during which a bullet pierced a Henry Moore sculpture on the museum grounds and a Warhol portrait of the Shahbanu was slashed with a knife.

However, for decades, an extraordinary trove of Western modern —masterpieces by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock— have been kept in the basement of a museum in Iran’s capital Tehran, shrouded in mystery:

According to estimates in 2018, the collection is worth as much as $3bn.

Only a small portion of the work has been exhibited since the 1979 Iranian Revolution but in recent years, the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has been showcasing some of its most captivating pieces.

The Eye to Eye² exhibition run from late 2024 into 2025 at TMoCA. It featured over 120-150 rare modern Western and Iranian artworks, many unseen for decades.

Picasso in Tehran² exhibition opened on March 11, 2025, and extended until June 2 amid public enthusiasm.

Quite amazingly, given that for example Picasso’s painting “features” a naked woman, the theocratic Iranian regime has allowed The Painter and His Model to be on exhibit at TMoCA.

Ironically, Picasso created one of his most iconic and well known works, Guernica, in response to the 26 April 1937 bombing of the town. Right now, the war that began on 28 February 2026 is (for the time being) erasing Iran¹ from the map (physical and digital).

A multibillion-dollar collection of 20th century masterworks is now sitting in one of the world’s most dangerous cities.

Wars do not only kill people and infrastructures, but also art, and therefore memory.

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(1) This post does not include images because the available samples are low quality and subject to copyright. I’m sorry about Picasso, cause I’m pretty sure that wherever he is right now, the would prefer to see his paintings showed in full quality.
(2) This post does not include links to original sites in Iran because they are all broken, right now.