It has survived intact the dangers of Iran’s Islamic revolution, the country’s war with Iraq and its subsequent isolation under United Nations sanctions.
A $3bn (£2bn) modern art collection built up by the former Empress of Iran includes dozens of sought-after pieces, notably a triptych by Francis Bacon, silkscreens by Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock’s Mural on Indian Red Ground.
The art world is now preparing for the first international tour of the works in more than 40 years. But the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, the home of the collection, has become the focus of street protests after a leak suggested that the authorities were planning its privatisation.
The campaigners have warned against the break-up of the collection of 1,500 works, which were hidden in a basement vault after the Shah and his wife fled the Iranian revolution in 1979.
The leaked documents included instructions from the museum’s board of managers to transfer legal authority over the works to the Roudaki Foundation, a private organisation that runs a symphony orchestra in Tehran.
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Supporters of the museum are outraged that the country would put one of its greatest cultural assets in jeopardy.
Masoumeh Mozaffari, head of the Society of Iranian Painters, helped to organise the demonstration last month that attracted hundreds of sympathisers declaring that “the museum is a national treasure” and “no to privatisation”.
The row comes as the works emerge into the international limelight thanks to last year’s agreement on Iran’s nuclear programme that led to the lifting of nuclear-related economic sanctions that had been imposed on the country. Officials have sought to mark the deal by allowing scores of the works to leave Iran for exhibitions in the West.
This autumn the State Museums in Berlin will host a special exhibition of 60 artworks from the collection — 30 western and 30 Iranian.
Talks are under way for a larger show at Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum next year that is expected to feature Picasso, Rothko and Warhol.
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Farah Pahlavi, the exiled empress, has welcomed the moves to show overseas the works she had started buying in the 1970s. She has long feared that the collection would one day be broken up.
“I was very worried for these works,” she told Vanity Fair last year, recalling how she had anonymously telephoned the museum to urge its officials to keep it intact.
“I said: listen, this is a cultural heritage and wealth for our country. It’s also a material wealth. It’s for our people. Don’t exchange anything. ”
The protesters believe that the Roudaki Foundation has neither the resources nor the expertise to safeguard the works. “This group cannot take care of the museum,” declared an Iranian graphic designer.
“We have had museums in Tehran that were closed due to lack of management. They were destroyed because of transfers and lack of care.”
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Others worry that the plans could sideline Firouz Shabazi Moghadam, the curator of the collection.
Moghadam, a former driver, was working at the museum when the revolution began and stayed behind to guard the collection after his senior colleagues fled.
He soon fell in love with the works, at times protecting them from fellow revolutionaries targeting symbols of western culture. “Only God knows where I got this courage from,” he told an interviewer last year. “With this vault, with this museum, I am like a lion.”
Iran has turned down large offers to buy some of the paintings over the years — including £80m from a Monaco foundation for a work by Bacon. It has parted with only one piece, a de Kooning, which was swapped in 1994 for the remnants of a renowned 400-year-old Islamic folio.
“That this collection has remained intact throughout political shifts in Iran is testament to the power of art and the centrality of culture to the Iranians,” said Shiva Balaghi, a visiting scholar at Brown University in Rhode Island.