The empress of art

Somewhere in the bowels of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is a portrait from a lost world. Its subject is a beautiful young woman: Her Imperial Majesty, Empress Farah Pahlavi of Iran. The condition of the work, however, a luminous print by Andy Warhol from 1977, is so bad that it could be a metaphor for Iran itself. Fundamentalist vandals have slashed at it with knives.

The Empress — forced into exile when the Iranian Revolution overthrew her husband, the Shah, two years after the portrait was completed — discovered this upsetting news while watching French TV in her Paris apartment. ‘Seeing that, I said, “They are stupid”,’ she tells me. ‘Instead of tearing it they could have sold it!’

One day, she hopes to see it on display again. ‘I hope this regime will not stay and this will be part of a collection to show what sort of people they are. What they have done to Iran is much more than tearing my portrait. But that will be part of the history — an example.’

We meet in a library above a swanky bookshop on Piccadilly, where the Empress-in-exile is being fussed over by an entourage of fashionable young women. She is the tallest person in the room — or seems it — and looks much younger than her 80 years, wearing a chic-looking navy blue power suit, with immaculately styled blonde hair identical to photographs of her from the time of the revolution.

A new book, Iran Modern: the Empress of Art, is being launched at an evening reception — and its two co-authors, Viola Raikhel-Bolot and Miranda Darling, are trying to coax her into signing copies. A vast, £650 volume (for those with a certain kind of coffee table), it tells the story of the Warhol portrait, the collection it belonged to and the part she, the Shah of Iran’s widow, played in establishing that collection.