TEHRAN -- The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA) has announced that 75,000 people visited “A Manifestation of World Contemporary Art”, an exhibition that displayed a number of rarely seen works by the world’s great artists.

A total 163 paintings, sculptures and 24 portraits by great artists such as Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Marc Chagall, Claude Monet, Henri Matisse and several others were showcased in the exhibit running from June 7 to November 11.
A number of diplomatic envoys in Tehran from the embassies of Switzerland, the Netherlands, Austria, Syria, Japan, South Korea and several other countries were among the visitors.
These visits generated requests for loan of several works kept at TMCA’s treasure-trove to exhibits in foreign countries.
Following her visit to the show in late June, Swiss Ambassador Livia Leu Agosti asked the TMCA to loan a painting by Pablo Picasso to an exhibit in Zurich.
In early October, the TMCA sent Picasso’s “The Painter and His Model” to Switzerland for the Kunsthaus Zurich show, which is currently underway.
In addition, The TMCA also loaned Dutch artist Kees van Dongen’s “Trinidad Fernandez” to Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam in August 2010 as a result of the Dutch ambassador’s visit to “A Manifestation of World Contemporary Art”.
The TMCA is currently evaluating a request by the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art for loan of a Jackson Pollock painting, “Mural on Indian Red Ground”, for a Pollock retrospective in the upcoming year.
Works by Mahmud Javadipur and Ahmad Esfandiari as the pioneers of Iranian modern art will be the TMCA’s next show, which will open November 28.
Photo: People rush to visit “A Manifestation of World Contemporary Art” after the opening ceremony of the show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA) on June 7, 2010. (Mehr/Abolfazl Salmanzadeh)