When Farah Pahlavi, empress-consort of Iran, was hosted by French president Georges Pompidou and his wife Claude in Paris at the beginning of the 1970s, she was enchanted by a new art installation the first couple had just commissioned at the Elysee Palace. The antechamber to their private apartments had been completely transformed by Israeli artist Yaacov Agam, a pioneer of kinetic art, into a swirl of colors and geometric shapes.

“The Salon Agam, as it was called, was in their private apartments, so not that many people were able to see it, but [the empress] visited the president a few times. She saw my father’s work and was totally taken,” Ron Agam, Yaacov’s son and himself an artist, recalled.

“My father received a phone call from [the president] saying that an important person wanted to meet with him,” he added. “We organized a presentation of his works in Paris. I was very young at the time, around 18. Her Majesty stayed for about an hour. She looked at many new works, and she acquired a number of them.”

The younger Agam shared the anecdotes in a phone interview with The Times of Israel, revealing the beginning of the story of how, 50 years later, an unknown number of his father’s pieces are still in Iran as part of the collection of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art.

The collection was mostly assembled by Pahlavi in the 1970s, when, taking advantage of the soaring oil price, the queen, who was very passionate about art, acquired artwork by the most renowned modern and contemporary artists, including Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Claude Monet, Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

In 2018, the entire collection’s value was estimated at $3 billion, and experts believe it would be worth far more today.

Yet the fate of the Agams remains shrouded in mystery. The museum was inaugurated in 1977, two years before the Islamic Revolution that brought the current regime to power. Only in the late 1990s and early 2000s did the museum begin to display parts of its collection that had been kept locked away in the vaults until then.

Many artworks have been exhibited and tracked through documents, and later, the museum’s website, as well as local and foreign media covering the events.

Over the years, works by........

© The Times of Israel