The Brooklyn Rail

The first image in All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group is a large reproduction. Monochrome, with black curved and interlocking shapes that sit between graphic design and abstraction, the drawing by Mohammed Ghani Hikmat was the poster for the Baghdad Modern Art Group’s first exhibition. It’s a powerful start to this show about the vastly significant art movement launched in Baghdad in the fifties and a reminder that so much art from this period in Iraq remains lost—either dispersed in the diaspora, destroyed in conflict, or looted from the Baghdad’s Modern Art Museum during the American invasion in 2003.

Baghdad’s artistic “Golden Age” in the fifties and sixties followed Iraq’s emergence from colonialism. Many Iraqi artists of the time studied abroad, such as the two at the core of the Modern Art Group: Jewad Selim, who went to the Slade in London in the late fortiess, and Shakir Hassan Al Said, who studied a decade later at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. When these artists returned home, they sought to marry the modernist abstraction they learned with ancient and vernacular Iraqi forms, a move both to establish a new postcolonial Iraqi identity and to shift Iraqi cultural discourse towards freedom and experimentation. Selim remains the most famous artist of that period and led the Baghdad Modern Art Group, which was formed in 1951 with nine artists and continued with annual exhibitions through 1971. Like all good art groups of the twentieth century, it announced its arrival with a manifesto, declaring allegiance to istilham, a word that translates as “seeking inspiration” but with the sense of looking to the past in order to move forward. The Group consolidated the efforts of the artists working at the time and helped to establish modern art as a credible discipline.

The show opens with the start of the Modern Art Group and a maquette of Selim’s most famous work: the Tahrir Square monument (1961) to the July 14th Revolution of 1958, a masterpiece that transposed his spindly curved forms from canvas to monument-size brass. It extends into the heyday of the period with examples by its members, including Selim’s sister Naziha Selim, the Palestinian writer and artist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and the Iraqi architect and artist Qahtan Awni; then into the generations that followed, which both advanced on and critically responded to the Modern Art Group; and finally, to the eighties generation who made work in the diaspora. Nada Shabout, who curated this show with Tiffany Floyd and Lauren Cornell, has two goals here: to present the work to an audience mostly unfamiliar with it, and to use the opportunity of further research to complicate the received story, filling in gaps about chronologies, relationships amongst artists, and differing intentions. The liberal display of archival material reflects the research mode of the exhibition, as well as the checkered history of the period, with so much lost. Indeed, the major contrast between the eighties generation and that of the fifties is not so much style but outlook: contrast Selim’s joyous celebration of Sumerian motifs with Sadik Kwaish Alfraji’s mournful depiction of his return to the family home in the monochrome animation The House my Father Built (2010).

Shabout quite literally wrote the book about Iraqi modernism and has curated a number of shows around the period, but this is the first time so much work by these artists has been brought together. It’s a beautiful encounter. I keep imagining a marble running along the forms on display, rounding over crests of abstract shapes, skimming along the curve of a rounded eyebrow, humming the blue comb of a rooster, lolling down the rounded back of a woman’s abaya, and then perhaps spiraling around a wood sculpture to roll quietly out of sight. Crescents were a crucial motif to these artists, drawing back to Mesopotamian visual heritage. Selim is particularly known for his rendering of almond-shaped eyes, but the show underlines how general this idiom was, as in the maternal duo depicted by Faraj Abbu (Mother and Child [1961]), the sculptures of Ghani Hikmat, or the (later) paintings of Dia al-Azzawi. Scenes of daily life in Iraq are a constant, as are animals, in both mythic and everyday registers. These are paintings that are fully in love with the richness of their past, and bold about establishing a new language. One of the most stunning works is Letters (1961) by Al Said, the number two in the group after Selim. It shows an exuberant play with colour that is not usually associated with the artist, who later became deeply influenced by Sufism and drastically curtailed not only his palette but also his parameters for how painting should be accomplished.

In trying to cover such large territory, the show falters at times in pursuing its narrative. Jewad Selim takes a central role, at times eclipsing the Group, and the connections between the subsequent generation of al-Azzawi and the New Vision artists could be more complexly elaborated with further examples of artworks. But these are minor quibbles compared to the chance to sit among these exemplars of a lost time. If this show is Selim’s wake, it is an inheritance far nicer to remember than the other legacies the country battles with today.