The widow of the Shah of Iran was painted by Warhol and assembled the greatest collection of art outside of Europe
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…