The art no one sees: a basement that symbolises cultural isolation

The Picasso masterpiece is worth an estimated £25-30m on the international art market, but its only regular contact with the human eye is the fiercely critical gaze of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

A life-size portrait of the Iranian leader stares in apparent disapproval at the Spanish master's The Painter and His Model, a piece that is every bit as provocative as it sounds. The two paintings hang almost opposite each other in a basement underneath Tehran's museum of contemporary art. Alongside, languishing in similar obscurity, is a startling array of world famous paintings by the likes of Monet, Van Gogh, Pissarro, Renoir, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Magritte, Miró and Braque.

The collection includes what is potentially the world's most valuable Jackson Pollock painting, Mural on a Red Indian Ground, and a pop-art section boasting Andy Warhol's portraits of Mick Jagger, Marilyn Monroe and Mao Zedong.



Despite being widely judged as the most important and comprehensive western art collection in Asia, the treasures are squirreled away behind a high-security door that can be opened only using a safe combination number. They are occasionally rolled out on request for visiting artists or art students.

But there are no plans to display them publicly. The paintings - purchased during the 1970s on the authority of the last shah's wife, Queen Farah - have fallen prey to the cultural isolationist beliefs of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iran's radical president is not just taking on the west over matters nuclear and geopolitical; the "buried" art is part of a general clampdown on social, intellectual and cultural freedoms.

You can see what an incredible collection they have on these two pages.