Bahman Mohasses: the sculpture commissioned by Empress Farah shown in London after 46 years

A copy of the sculpture "Musician Faun" by Bahman Mohasses, whose original Empress Farah Pahlavi commissioned in 1971 for the square of Tehran's City Theatre, is on show these days at the Frieze Masters art fair in Regent's Park, London. It is the first time since 1980 that the work has been shown publicly in London.

The copy on display, 1.2 meters tall, was made in 1973, comes from a private collection in Italy and is not for sale. It is presented on the stand of the Ab-Anbar gallery, run by Salman Matinfar, a gallery that moved from Tehran to London in 2020. The fair runs until Sunday, 18 October 2026.

Empress Farah's commission for Tehran's City Theatre

In 1971 Empress Farah Pahlavi commissioned two public sculptures for the square of Tehran's City Theatre, which had just been built at the time, and "Musician Faun" was one of the two. The sculpture shows a mythical creature with an elongated body playing a reed pipe, and its nudity was controversial even in the Tehran of those years, which was open. According to Salman Matinfar, in those years the sculpture had become a meeting point for young Tehranis.

The commission was part of Empress Farah's broad support for modern Iranian art, support that led to the building of the City Theatre and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art and brought Iranian artists onto the world stage. DIAR had earlier written, in a report, about Empress Farah's guardianship of Iran's cultural heritage.

The sculpture's fate after the 1979 revolution

After the 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic removed the sculpture from the City Theatre square, and for about 20 years nothing was known of its fate. In the late 2000s a photograph was published showing the sculpture in pieces in the basement of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art; the work has never been shown publicly since.

Mohasses made three versions of the work: the public sculpture in Tehran, a small copy in a private collection, and the 1973 version now in London. Bahman Mohasses, a painter and sculptor born in Rasht who studied in Italy and was influenced by Greek myths, died in Rome in 2010. He spent most of his artistic life away from Iran and destroyed part of his own works.

The fate of "Musician Faun" is an example of the Islamic Republic's treatment of the artistic heritage of the Pahlavi era: a work made for a public square in the capital remained broken in a museum basement.

A work Empress Farah commissioned for the people of Tehran can, after 46 years, be seen only outside Iran.