"Then I left. And in the fall, a member of my staff saw a piece of paper sticking out of the painting, shoved up under the frame. He took it out, and it said, 'The next time, this will be a bomb.' "
In retrospect, he said, it was "a mistake" to display the painting -- that one and another, De Kooning's "Woman III," one of his violent, garish nudes.
As the streets filled increasingly with protesters, the museum staff elected to send the Western collection to the basement, intended then as a temporary shelter.
"It wasn't hidden. Well, in some way it was. But the main point was to keep them intact," Aghdashloo said. "At the beginning of the revolution, nobody knew what could happen. So they just dug the ground. It was like World War II and Dresden's collection. They put all the collection in caves. The same with the Louvre. This happens. You try to keep it safe. They did it. They kept it."
That has been the most widely misunderstood aspect of Iran's hidden art collection. Apart from a few politicians and clerics, who deplored it, its shelter in the basement vault by a generation of caretakers has largely been an exercise of love.
"It may be hard for people outside to know how deeply felt this was, how extraordinarily rich visually this culture was, and what a deep love it had for art in all its forms," Galloway said. "The love for beauty, for artistic expressions, ornamentation, design, color. I would say that in a funny kind of way, a collection that included Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein was nonetheless rooted in that culture."
There have been some calls in the parliament to sell off the Western collection -- what good was it doing anyone in the basement, after all. But by all accounts, only a single painting was disposed of: "Woman III," which was quietly traded in 1994 for the remainder of the exquisite 16th century Persian manuscript Tahmasbi Shahnameh, which includes a series of miniatures created by Safavid master painters and their students.
The De Kooning ended up in the private collection of Los Angeles entertainment magnate David Geffen, who last year sold it to hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen for about $137.5 million.
Few in Iran were sorry to see it go.
"It wasn't just that she was naked. It was showing a woman completely degraded," said Shahriar Adl, an art enthusiast who helped arrange the original swap. "It represents a naked woman as a personification of the devil, as horrible as possible."
