Critic
What It Took to Assemble Iran’s $3 Billion Modern Art Collection
A new book by curator Donna Stein details the whirlwind acquisition process that built that greatest collection of modern art you’ve never seen.
Max Ernst’s Histoire Naturelle, from 1923.
Source: Skira
In 1975, Donna Stein embarked on a semi-secret, two-year effort to build a contemporary art collection for the empress of Iran.
Before she was hired as part of the empresses’s private secretariat, Stein was an assistant curator in the prints and illustrated books department at MoMA and was given very little direction before and during her tenure in Tehran.