Tower and Town, May 2022

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A Century of Iraqi Art

Iraqi artists of the mid twentieth century thought of modern art as an active space of shared humanity within which they were able to negotiate their contribution to building a new nation with a distinctive culture and to the notion of international art. The newly gained independence and formation of the Iraqi nation allowed Iraqi artists the freedom to create a new structure and art tradition. Faced with long years of cultural stagnation and discontinuity, a new tradition needed to be invented to express Iraq’s new aspirations. Their conscious desire to understand and participate in building the new Iraqi nation as a coherent whole resulted in the creation of an iconography that is recognized until this day as distinctly Iraqi, in both form and content.

Following the philosophy and spirit of modernity and its concept of the nation-state, the visual language they created was based on a specific negotiation (selection and synthesis) of what they believed constituted the "Iraqiness" of the various and multiple factions of society. These elements were then merged into a multifaceted identity capable, as they perceived it, of representing the pluralistic whole. At the same time, the establishment of the Iraqi National Museum and a growing popular interest in antiquities helped to introduce and encourage young artists to study ancient Iraqi and Islamic art through direct involvement in the Museum’s various preservation projects, thus instigating new developments in style and concepts.

Thus, Iraqi visual artists embarked on the task of visually constructing and performing their conception of an Iraqi culture during the 1950s. Work developed in the 1950s, however, certainly has its roots in an important number of experiments starting at the turn of the twentieth century. Of the 1940s artist Jewad Selim wrote: "During these four years [in reference to WWII], Paris and Europe stopped producing beautiful work but Baghdad did not. It worked slowly and quietly. It was poor and uneducated but it worked hard during these 4 to 5 years. The first Art Institute was established [1941/43], as well as the first official atelier and the first strong movement in the theatre and music. They were few who faced danger from all sides, from their creative work to preparing the public to appreciate and understand it."

The work of the pioneer artist Abdul-Qadir al-Rassam, one of the first modern Iraqi artists and art educators, connected art with nationalistic sentiments through localizing his subject matter, and producing romantic representations of the environment of Baghdad. As a former soldier trained in Ottoman modern military schools in Istanbul, his military training included a topography curriculum, and offered courses in drawing, painting and perspective. Upon his retirement after World War I and return to Baghdad, he utilized his art training to produce works endowed with nationalistic symbolism through landscape.

During and following the years of WWII, artists took a more active role in their use of symbolic styles and choice of subject matter. Generally speaking, works of art before the 1950s touched Iraqis through their subject matter: like images of the desert by Faiq Hassan and Iraqi nature in Atta Sabri's paintings. In the absence of a tradition of representation, Iraqis were shocked by the familiar of their lives that they have perhaps forgotten on canvas. Two of the most popular and considered influential in the history of modern Iraqi art were Faiq Hassan and Jewad Selim. Hassan's and Selim's works exemplified the anxious search for a form that could express their content without contradiction. It is in fact this tension between form and content that gave their work its creative rhythm. Hassan's subdued studies of brute facial expressions (studies of individualism) were attempts to construct new features for the ‘Iraqi individual’, which interestingly were dynamically opposed to his vibrant oil portraiture. The notion of certain features of an ‘Iraqi’ character was widespread in Iraqi literature of the 1950s. However, the result of their search was materialized in distinct ways. Hassan’s work came to embody what could be termed an ‘Iraqi spirit’. Selim on the other hand was not satisfied with expressing the spirit but wanted to forge, with high passion, a vocabulary visually capable of interpreting this spirit. The mid twentieth century was an age of optimism and possibilities. During the 1950s, three main and extremely active art groups, each formed around and by a noted artist that embodied artists' struggles to carve a socially accepted space for their local and world vision, shaped the period: al-Ruwad led by Faiq Hassan, the Baghdad Group of Modern Art, Jama't Baghdad lil Fan al-Hadith, led by Jewad Selim and Shakir Hassan Al Said, and the Impressionists (most of whom experimented with post-impressionist and cubist styles) led by Hafidh al-Doroubi. The three groups consisted of about 50 artists (painters and sculptors) who, while not necessarily always acting collectively as groups, remained very active individually. With the return of students from abroad and the increasing number of graduates from the Fine Arts Institute and the Art Academy, the number of art groups only multiplied during the 1960s.

Most influential in promoting new ideals were the members of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art. What this group of artists initiated were visual cultural rhythms through Iraqi art. Through their work they established methodologies that opened the doors for analytical and critical deconstruction of history and tradition and their reconstruction into cultural icons loaded with the symbolism of identity. They probed the wealth of historical iconography and left a long-lasting epistemological imprint. Moreover, members of the Baghdad Group of Modern

Art widened the search beyond visual patrimony to encompass visual interpretations and transformations of historical literary and folk inheritance. In their efforts they not only asserted their visual distinctiveness but also they contributed to the formation of modern Iraqi identities. These experiments were continued by subsequent generations, allowing for Iraqi cultural identities to incessantly evolve.

(“A Century of Iraqi Art” is published in full ,(up to 21st century), in the extended May 2022 on-line Mesopotamia + edition of Tower & Town)

Nada Shabout is a Regent Professor of Art History and the Coordinator of the Contemporary Arab and Muslim Cultural Studies Initiative at the University of North Texas.

Nada Shabout