Tehran museum opens exhibit titled ‘Art and War’ with American artists

The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art has opened an exhibit with works by American pop artists Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist as Iranian cultural institutions increasingly position art and artists as part of the country’s wartime messaging.

Images published by Iranian state media and reviewed by Urgent Matter showed that the exhibit “Art and War” included a lithograph print of Rosenquist’s F-111 the artist’s sprawling anti-war work responding to media imagery surrounding U.S. involvement in Vietnam. It depicts a fighter-bomber alongside a nuclear mushroom cloud and the face of a child.

Coincidentally, the original painting from which the lithograph is derived is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Photographs from the exhibition, which opened May 3, also showed Indiana’s 1963 work Figure 5 and his 1962 painting Terre Haute No. 2, as well as Lichtenstein’s 1962 painting Bratatat!, a comic book-inspired image of a fighter pilot inside a cockpit viewed as commentary on the industrialized nature of modern warfare.

The exhibition additionally included large-scale sculptures by the French artist Jean Dubuffet.

The Iranian Students' News Agency described the collection as providing “a distinctive opportunity to reflect on and reassess the influence of contemporary conflicts and modern crises on global artists and art, on the development of various artistic schools and movements.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s semi-official Mehr News Agency reported that a second exhibition in the museum’s “Art and War” series, opening Monday, would feature works by Pablo Picasso, Antoni Tàpies, Robert Motherwell and Juan Gris.

The exhibit arrives as Iranian cultural institutions and state-linked media increasingly emphasize the role of artists and cultural production during the ongoing conflict. In recent days, Iranian outlets have argued that artistic and media production can at times exert greater influence on public opinion than military force itself.

“Artists and cultural figures were neither passive nor neutral during wartime,” according to a report from ISNA on the role of artists in the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. “Using every artistic form available to them, they stood beside the people and defended the nation.”

And in a recent meeting of university cultural officials in Ardabil province, administrators and clerics urged universities to promote Iran’s achievements in the war through artistic and cultural programming, including through public exhibitions and events in collaboration with state institutions.

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