Piece collected by shah joins Bacon show

A major Francis Bacon painting that has lain hidden in the vaults of an Iranian museum for three decades went on display in London for the first time Friday.

The 1968 triptych, “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendants,” shows two naked men on a bed in the central panel. They are watched on one side by a naked man in a chair with a flapping bird, on the other by a monkey and a seated man wearing a suit.

The triptych is on loan from Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art to the Tate Britain gallery in central London, where it will be shown with other Bacon works for six months.

It is one of scores of paintings and sculptures by masters such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Gauguin and Auguste Renoir that were ordered collected for the state of Iran by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife, Farah Diba, during the oil boom of the 1970s.

They were locked away at the Museum of Contemporary Art after the shah was overthrown in 1979. For years the collection remained in the museum’s vaults.