Art against the odds: on two recent trips to Iraq, the author found that artists are continuing to make work despite the massive upheaval in their country

Art in America, June-July, 2004 by Steven Vincent

On a trash-lined street in the Mustansiriya District of Baghdad squats the ministry of labor and social affairs, a low-slung building unremarkable except for a 13-foot-high mural positioned near its entrance. The artwork consists of yellow, orange and purple paint swirling around images of doves, traditional Baghdadi architecture and the sun rising over a sky-blue mosque. "I wanted to capture the relief and euphoria Iraqis felt with liberation," Esam Pasha Azizawy told me. He painted the work soon after the fall of Saddam Hussein in April 2003. More than a work of art, the mural is also a political statement: funded by the American-led coalition, it replaces a portrait of the deposed dictator. Recalls Azizawy, "It took me two weeks to scrape Saddam's face off the wall--I'd scrape off one, only to find another underneath."

The tenacity of Saddam's image is a metaphor for present-day Iraq. As its people struggle through horrific violence toward their uncertain future, they find that the shadow of the dictator persists--a situation equally true for the country's visual-arts scene. Alternately coddled, cloistered, privileged and shut off from the world by Saddam's ruling Ba'ath Party, Iraqi art today suffers from a kind of esthetic dwarfism--strong on talent and ambition, yet stunted by lack of opportunities, access to world markets and informed criticism. As a result, with a few exceptions, the art being produced today ranges from something resembling the work of promising young art students to the worst forms of Orientalist kitsch. "We're just now entering the media bubble of international art," mused Azizawy, who along with creating colorful, Kandinsky-like canvases speaks five languages, including near-perfect English. "For years, we just thought about how much we hated Saddam. Now Iraqi artists are thinking about the world."

I visited Iraq twice, in the fall of 2003 and the winter and spring of 2004. Just after I left the country in mid-March, hell broke loose in the form of intensified fighting between coalition forces and paramilitary gunmen west and south of Baghdad, and within the city itself. In e-mail correspondences with my Iraqi friends since my return, I have found them shaken, worried, but still determined to carry on with making art. These are artists, after all, who have already experienced a tyrant's regime, a decade of crippling economic sanctions, two wars and the current conflict, which has seen their city assaulted by high-tech weaponry and by mobs of looters who have burned everything from high-rise office buildings to museums. "Iraqis are survivors," Azizawy wrote me, putting a brave face on the situation. "We will get through this, too."

The looting of antiquities from the Iraqi National Museum soon after Saddam fell has received plenty of press. What garnered less attention, though, was the equally devastating gutting of the Saddam Arts Center (now called the Baghdad Arts Center). Along with portraits of Saddam and middlebrow artworks, looters took away important works made by the early 20th-century artists known as the "Pioneers," who introduced European-style modernism to Iraq. When I was at the house of the artist Mohammad Rassim one evening, he showed me 15 works on paper from the museum that he purchased from an Iraqi policeman who admitted stealing them; similarly, Qasim Al-Septi, a suave Baghdadi artist who founded the popular Hewar Art Gallery nearly 12 years ago, bought a dozen paintings on the black market that he is storing at the Hewar until "Iraq establishes a new art museum." Insha'allah, the Iraqis say--God willing.

When I was in Iraq, everyone who was anyone spent time at the Hewar, a combination commercial art space, garden teahouse cafe and gossip nexus. On any given day, a visitor might rub shoulders with correspondents from major news services, foreign consulate officials, former secret police informants and AK-47-toting guards from the adjacent Turkish Embassy. (Last October, during my first visit to Iraq, a car bomb detonated next to the embassy, showering the Hewar with burning palm fronds and automobile parts.)

"Like the man who loves dice or drink, I love art," says Al-Septi. His own artwork is some of the best you'll see in town: gutting the pages of old books he finds throughout the city, Al-Septi spreads the covers and mounts them on canvas adding bits of text and other found items. The result is yet another metaphor of Iraq--a book whose original text has been violently ripped out of its cover and now waits to be rewritten.

Other artists look back to the period when Iraq wrote the text of the world--at least its great myths and early legal codes. Cluttering Ahmed Al-Safi's downtown Baghdad apartment--where I once saw two small oil sketches by New York artist Steve Mumford [see A.i.A., Feb. '04], who was spending his afternoons painting in Al-Safi's studio--are numerous oil-on-canvas works featuring colorful sticklike figures, whose strange postures in surrounding desert landscapes conjure the ancient days of Ahura-Mazda, Gilgamesh and Iraq's Babylonian greatness. In Mesopotamia (1999), for example, a palm tree morphs into a four-legged creature who suckles three standing figures--an obvious symbol of rebirth that nurtured Al-Safi's own spirits. "Around the time I painted this I was in despair that Saddam would live forever. My work was my only escape."