A Bridge Across Millennia
Stepping into the current exhibition, All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery, one is immediately struck by the strange, magnetic friction between the past and the present. These canvases and sculptures do not merely represent the mid-20th century; they act as a conduit, pulling the heavy, dust-caked grandeur of Mesopotamian antiquity into the sharp, existential focus of the post-colonial era. For the viewer, these works—on view through January 3, 2027—are not just historical artifacts. They are the visual manifestation of a nation struggling to define itself in the wake of empire.
In the 1950s, a group of Iraqi intellectuals, led by the towering figure of Jawad Saleem and the philosopher-artist Shakir Hassan Al Said, began to look at their own soil not as a graveyard of failed civilizations, but as an infinite, living archive. They were the Baghdad Modern Art Group, and they were intent on a radical act of cultural reclamation.
The Architect of Iraqi Modernism
Jawad Saleem is the movement’s beating heart. Born in Ankara in 1919 and raised in a family that saw him blossom into a prolific painter and sculptor, Saleem was a restless traveler. Having studied in Europe, he possessed an intimate command of Western modernism—its jagged lines, its psychological depth, its embrace of the abstract. Yet, he returned to Baghdad with a singular, subversive conviction: Iraqi art should not be a subservient imitation of the Parisian school. It needed a soul rooted in the Tigris and Euphrates.
Saleem’s life work was a relentless pursuit of this synthesis. He did not merely adopt European techniques; he interrogated them, forcing them to house the ghosts of Assyrian reliefs and the geometry of Islamic calligraphic tradition. His masterpiece, the Nasb al-Hurriyya (Monument of Freedom) in Baghdad, remains the ultimate testament to his vision. Tragically, Saleem died in 1961 while the monument was still under construction, but his impact remains monumental. He effectively dismantled the idea that "modernity" was a Western import, instead positioning Iraqi history as an essential, foundational component of the contemporary global imagination.
The Philosopher of the Soil
While Saleem provided the visual dynamism, Shakir Hassan Al Said provided the philosophical scaffolding. Born in the rural town of Samawah in 1925, Al Said brought a visceral, earthy perspective to the group. For him, art was a contemplative practice—an attempt to bridge the gap between the suffering of the Iraqi peasantry and the high-minded concepts of abstract art. He saw the "brown, painful and toiling faces" of his youth as something sacred, a thread connecting the present to the dawn of civilization.
The Baghdad Modern Art Group encouraged artists to explore techniques that combined both Arab heritage and modern art forms, charting a new Arabic art aesthetic which allowed for valuations of regional art through lenses that were uniquely Arabic rather than Western.
Al Said’s brilliance lay in his ability to theorize this shift. He did not want to paint the "look" of the ancient world; he wanted to capture its metaphysical essence. Through his writings and his shifting, layered compositions, he developed a vocabulary that allowed artists to value their own regional heritage without apology. He recognized that if Iraq was to move forward, it had to fully understand the weight of its own heritage, not as a static relic, but as a living, breathing force capable of radical transformation.
Why They Still Matter
Why, in the 21st century, does the Baghdad Modern Art Group retain such potency? Because the questions they posed remain urgent. How does a post-colonial nation retain its integrity in a globalized market? How can an artist utilize the language of abstraction without losing the specificities of their home? The exhibition in Abu Dhabi reminds us that the Baghdad Modern Art Group was not just an art movement; it was a manifesto for autonomy.
By refusing to choose between the ancient and the modern, these artists carved out a third space—a space where a peasant’s garment could be rendered with the same structural importance as a Sumerian votive figure. They showed us that the "modern" is not a fixed point in time, but a continuous conversation with our ancestors. As we navigate our own era of complex identity and cultural negotiation, the experiments of 1950s Baghdad feel less like history and more like a blueprint for the future.
