North Tehran looked like Beverly Hills, the queen was known as the Jackie Kennedy of the Middle East, and Warhol was ordering caviar from room service. Now there were snipers on the streets and the portraits were stacked in the vault of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, along with another three hundred masterpieces from the world’s great painters, a collection valued at $3 billion. There would be no more Western art. The only consolation was that the works had not been destroyed.
