An Iranian museum holds a rare exhibit of American art, reflecting on war

In the heart of Tehran, where anti-American billboards line the streets, the government-run Museum of Contemporary Art has opened an exhibit of six works by Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana and James Rosenquist. The pieces, pulled from a collection assembled by the shah’s wife in the 1970s, were chosen explicitly for their anti-war themes at a moment when Iranian cities have lived under weeks of U.S.-Israeli bombardment.

The exhibit, titled “Art and War,” features Rosenquist’s massive “F-111,” a 1960s collage that merges a fighter jet fuselage, a nuclear mushroom cloud and a child’s face in indictment of America’s military-industrial complex. Nearby hangs Lichtenstein’s “Brattata,” the comic-book-style canvas of a pilot downing an enemy plane. Museum director Reza Dabirinezhad told Iran’s semiofficial ISNA news agency the show was meant “to respond to the events unfolding around it.”

That collection—valued in the billions and including Picasso, Van Gogh, Rothko and Hockney—was largely hidden after the 1979 Islamic Revolution to avoid offending clerical sensibilities or seeming too Western. Most pieces stayed in storage for decades. Since 2012 the museum has risked temporary displays, even trading a Willem de Kooning in 1994 for a Persian Shahnameh manuscript rather than sell off treasures amid sanctions.

Visitors this week, many still dazed from recent conflict, saw their own experience reflected back. Artist Ghazaleh Jahanbin said she was struck by how American artists “ridicule war,” speculating it stems from their “geographical distance from war itself.” Mohammad Sadegh Abbasi was more blunt: “Some of the works remind me of the scenes I saw during the war.” The museum limited the show to a handful of pieces so they could be rushed back into safe storage if fighting resumes.

The timing is its own statement. A shaky ceasefire since early April has allowed galleries to reopen, yet Iran has sealed the Strait of Hormuz and the U.S. has blockaded Iranian ports. Negotiations drag on with no resolution. The exhibit runs through May 10, with new war-related works scheduled to rotate out of the vault each week.

What Tehran’s clerics once locked away as ideologically dangerous is now selectively useful: American art that condemns American wars, displayed while both nations edge toward the next round. The irony is not lost on the young Iranians walking the galleries, hoping, as Abbasi put it, that “everything ends well soon and we get a secure and calm life.”

Original reporting: ABC News.