IRAQ: Michael Jansen explored a few of Baghdad's art galleries, some of the best on offer in the Arab world
Off the main road in Baghdad's Karada quarter is a narrow street given over to small art galleries and glass-fronted workshops.
At an easel sits Saleh Hamdawi, a graduate of Iraq's Academy of Art, painting a portrait of a newly married Iraqi couple, stiff in wedding finery. The moustachioed man is in a dark suit, wide white cuffs showing at the wrists, his hands still undefined pink blobs. Hands are always difficult to paint. The woman's lips are bright red. The air conditioner coughs its chill breath onto the painter.
The wall behind the easel is crowded with abstract and figurative paintings. Buxom women in oriental dress lounging on low divans, well-executed horses galloping across sandy flats, geometric abstracts in earth colours. One or two are surprisingly good, all are typically Iraqi.
The painters and sculptors of Iraq are the best in the Arab world but even Iraq's modern masters - who emerged in the 1930s under British occupation - tailored some of their output to satisfy a Westernising middle class seeking copies of paintings by European impressionists and colourful designs to adorn the walls of their new homes.
My eye is caught by a yellow, white and brown oil of a village laid thick on canvas. Hamdawi says the price is $35 with the frame. I tell him I will think it over.
Karin, a German colleague, and I move to the next slightly more upmarket gallery. The owner is conversing at length on the phone as his assistant wraps a large object for a customer. The display includes an intricate pen sketch of a traditional house by one of Iraq's masters, at $250, two small panels covered in carpet designs, naive watercolours of women gossiping and village life, and clay tablets decorated with a horned dragon and a chubby horse.
Karin takes the horse, I the dragon, copied from the bas-reliefs of the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. Iraqi painters and sculptors have always been inspired by figures and themes of antiquity, as well as tales from the Arabian Nights and tribal romances.
Back in Hamdawi's gallery, a second painter is working at the easel on a portrait of a grinning, corpulent, pink-faced US soldier crowned with a palm leaf and a blonde female companion. "Their translators come with holiday and family photos for us to copy," remarked Ali Mohan, as he applied dark blue to the pupil of one eye. "This couple was in Hawaii. The translator gets $30 and we get $30 ... I hate this work. But I must eat and pay my rent."
Hamdawi accepts $25 for the painting I fancy, prises it out of the frame and off the stretcher and rolls it so I can carry it home to Cyprus.
Iraqi art owes a great deal to three men: Fayek Hassan, who established the Société Primitive; Jawad Selim, who founded the Baghdad Modern Art Group; and Hafidh Droubi, who led the post-impressionists and cubists here. The state encouraged artists by establishing the Fine Arts Institute and the Fine Arts Academy and providing fellowships to study in Paris, London, Rome and Warsaw.
After the 1958 coup which toppled the monarchy, artists adopted revolutionary politics as well as modernist means of expression. According to an old friend, the late Jabra Jabra, a novelist and poet who wrote extensively on art, Iraqi artists "consider their work, basically, as part of the struggle of an Arab nation emerging as a new force in today's world."
Since the Saddam Modern Art Museum was pillaged after the US war, the largest collection in Baghdad of paintings and drawings of the masters seems to reside at the home of a gallery owner. "I was afraid they might be bombed or looted if I left them in a gallery," he remarks. The works are stacked against walls, chairs and tables in the spacious salon, furniture and art work veiled in a thick layer of dust, dimming colours and blurring images. "If I sell one or two, we can live on the proceeds for a year and I can buy something new," he observes.
Works of the masters fetch thousands of dollars.
During the rule of Saddam Hussein, artists made portraits of him in paint and bronze. The paintings were installed in the Modern Art Museum and the statues in the streets and parks of Iraq's cities and towns. Many of the paintings were destroyed, and the statues were pulled down and sold for scrap.
The events of the past 15 months have deeply shaken Iraq's artists. Some create dark works portraying the destruction wreaked by the war. Others stage demonstrations.
In June, 25 artists mounted an exhibit in the street in front of the Hiwar Gallery in central Baghdad. The display, entitled "Abu Gulag Freedom Park," protested the abuse and torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. A sculpture by Taher Wahib depicted the Statue of Liberty, chained hands replacing her head, feet bound together, and robe set on fire by the torch of freedom. Ali Rissan created five masks of soldier-occupiers, from fresh-faced liberators to hideous oppressors.
The owner of the gallery, Qassim al-Sabti, exhibited a life-size figure of a woman wrapped in a bloodstained white shroud, symbolising the rape of Iraq.