Advertising hoardings that normally feature the latest smartphones, home appliances or banks and insurance plans have made way -- until May 16 -- for masterpieces by famous artists in a giant urban beautification scheme.
Vincent Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Edvard Munch's The Scream and The Blue Window by Henry Matisse are among the reproductions lining streets and highways, aiming to get citizens more interested in art and to encourage gallery visits.
The project -- A Gallery as Big as a Town -- took the city by surprise on Wednesday morning.
"It's great to see these paintings instead of commercials for this or that brand," said Leyla Mohammadi, a 24-year-old student in the capital.
Some 1,600 billboards featuring 200 Western and Asian works and 500 Iranian ones now sit near murals of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his predecessor, the Islamic republic's founder Ruhollah Khomeini, and countless martyrs of the Iran-Iraq war.
The art, all of which would have required approval by the culture ministry -- nudes are banned in Iran and other works risk being deemed un-Islamic -- may be considered a distraction as well as a welcome sight in a city where fatal road accidents and bad driving are common.
REVOLUTIONARY SLOGANS
For example, The Son of Man, the apple in the face of a man in tie and bowler hat work by Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte, stares out at drivers from an overpass.
But the sprawling scheme represents an evolution, albeit temporary, in the city's appearance: after the Islamic revolution in 1979 advertising was banned on the grounds that it encouraged materialism and consumerism.
Street and television adverts, however, started popping up in the 1990s and then proliferated, now accompanied by the occasional public health promotion.
The art also offers a softer side to an architecturally bland cityscape where concrete housing blocks and revolutionary slogans such as "Death to America" and "We will always resist" are common.
The art has been a long time coming, Hamid Rezaie, a public relations officer for the Organisation for Tehran's Beautification, told AFP, noting that an Iranian sculptor, Said Shalapour, came up with the idea a decade ago.
By Siavosh Ghazi
