Khaled al-Rahal’sCarpet (1965), at a mere 9 x 12 inches, encourages you to lean in a bit more than you might like. Suspended against a beige background whose mottled impasto recalls patinated bronze, the work  offers a new and more intimate way to look at a well-trodden art object that has become, at least in the Western imagination, one of the most potent symbols of Islamic art. al-Rahal’s carpet wants nothing to do with the scrolling arabesques and palmette blossoms that characterize the great Safavid court carpets at the Met, whose aesthetic power—if admired from far back enough—is inseparable from a recognition of the gargantuan human possibility at work in creating objects of such scale. 

al-Rahal’s carpet, on the other hand, only permits its viewer to make out its gnarled globules of crimson, navy, and turquoise knots and outstretched black warps if they squint hard enough. Its composition, a condensed emulsion of lines, bulbous forms, and energetically interspersed colors, bears some trace of the freneticism that defines the Met’s best carpets. But the awe it inspires is its own, the unique result of al-Rahal’s fulfillment of the mission of the broader movement to which he belonged: the Baghdad Modern Art Group (BMAG), in particular its loyalty to what its founder Jewad Selim (1919–1961) called istilham alturath. One might translate “istilham” as “seeking inspiration,” derived as it is from the Semitic root denoting instinct or revelation. “Turath” is often translated as “heritage,” but in this case means something akin to the traditions which the manifold bygone civilizations that form the bedrock of Iraqi national identity have left behind. So: seeking inspiration from historical tradition. 

Curated by Nada Shabout at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, where it ran from June 21 until this past week, All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group told the BMAG’s story in a landmark retrospective, the first of its kind to center this vital juncture in the development of modern Arab art. Shabout points out that the movement, founded in 1951, “mediates between the past and the present . . . with the aim to not replicate but project forward and realize contemporary aesthetics.” In short, modern life calls for a revitalization of what once was, rather than blind fealty to it—or, worse, its destruction via collective amnesia.

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Despite the seismic influence it continues to exercise on Arab artists today, the BMAG took center stage during a comparatively undersung moment in the development of Arab Modernism: the spirited, tumultuous period from the 1950s to the 1970s when Baghdad staked its claim as a center of intellectual Arab life and aesthetic innovation rivaling Beirut and Cairo. Resounding through Iraqis artists’ work at the time were a turbulent set of historical vibrations: first through the dying days of British rule in Iraq after WWII, then the series of brutal military dictatorships set off by the ’58 Revolution.

A convenience inherent to the BMAG’s attempt to wed Iraqi art with Modernism was that the region’s aesthetic tradition already revered abstraction. The repeated motifs that define Islamic architecture—muqarnas decorative vaulting, girih tilework, and mihrab arches that one finds in monuments spanning Granada’s Alhambra to Samarkand’s Bibi-Khanym Mosque—are what perhaps led the artist Shakir Hassan Al Said to proclaim that the BMAG’s embrace of Modernist abstraction represented a view of the world from a “purely Arab perspective.” Al Said seems to be implying that the Islamic Golden Age had passed the Modernist baton over to Europe several centuries ahead of the curve, and it was now the BMAG’s job to wrest it back. It helped that many of the artists represented in All Manner of Experiments trained in European academies and witnessed their pillaged cultural heritage displayed prominently in European museums. Looking at their work now, one can pick up on not just an interest in aesthetic rebirth, but also a lament for a long-lost sense of Abbasid, Sumerian, Babylonian, or Assyrian glory that, via paintbrush or sculptor’s clay, could once again return within reach. 

Things, however, have changed since the Abbasids, which the left-aligned BMAG members make clear through innovations in form as well as subject. If you walk into the room to the right of al-Rahal’s Carpet, you find yourself facing a pair of bloated, angular eyes contemplating something perennially afar and almost out of sight. 

Selim’s Woman and Sewing Machine (1951) was painted the year he founded the BMAG, and can easily be read as a rallying cry for women’s liberation in modern Iraq. An elderly woman clad in an abaya finds herself balancing a large sewing machine above her head. Swift, vertical pastel lines resembling prison bars flank her as she looks on, holding the anvil-like object atop her head with ease as she caresses a chicken with her other hand––a beloved pet, possibly, or more likely dinner prep. She appears to bear the burden of her domestic demands with a dignified absentmindedness, preferring instead to share an opaque gaze with us. The pitch-black of the abaya contrasts with the mauve dress and golden bangles hiding beneath it, vibrant colors that choose to reveal themselves as her sleeve falls. Selim’s portrayal never imposes itself as a political message, but rather emanates from a desire to depict everyday life in a way that befits istilham alturath’s mediation between tradition and modernity—a balancing act of its own that may occasionally, as with Woman and Sewing Machine, lead Selim and his associates to moments of ambivalence. 

An interest in everyday life was central to the BMAG’s ethos. The group’s founding manifesto exclaims: “We will build that which was destroyed in the realm of pictorial art in Iraq since the thirteenth-century school of Yehya al-Wasiti and we will connect the chain that was broken when Baghdad fell to the hands of the Mongols.” Yehya al-Wasiti was the illustrator of one of Arabic literature’s masterpieces, the Maqamat of al-Hariri (1054–1122), a work of social satire known for its dynamic portrayal of Baghdadi lives at all rungs of the Abbasid social ladder. The dignity that the illustrations afforded to the daily lives of Baghdad’s inhabitants struck the BMAG as utterly contemporary. Al Said wrote: “It is not an illusion that an Iraqi painter arose from the first half of the seventh century [Hijri] with the same skills as a modern painter.” The group claimed al-Wasiti as its patrimony, and Selim’s Woman and Sewing Machine emerges from an engagement with his legacy as a chronicler of the quotidian. 

On the same wall is one of Selim’s most haunting works, Children’s Games (1953). Belonging to a series of paintings called the Baghdadiat, in homage to al-Hariri, Children’s Games uses curvilinear and geometric forms to depict children playing on the streets of Baghdad. Drawn from his years spent working in the antiquities department at the National Museum of Iraq, Selim’s children possess faces that are composed of moonlike motifs commonly found on ancient Mesopotamian sculptures, though they may appear to us like they came out of Hey Arnold!. Their bodies are likewise a jumble of multicolor circles, triangles, and zigzag lines that recall cuneiform script. Some of them appear to be holding scythes––or are they Islamic crescents?––to jump rope with. All of them regard the viewer with a look of skepticism and fear in their eyes, barring a pair of distracted lovers embracing under an arch on the bottom left. 

The background of the painting evokes the De Stijl movement’s frustrated attempts at geometric homogeneity, but Selim’s introduction of children adds a menacing touch, amplified by a crosshair in the painting’s top left quadrant. The brushwork vacillates between a flatness and a suggestion of depth in these ostensibly negative spaces that enable the children to stake their spatial claim on the canvas. What initially appears to be a dialogue between geometric form, architectural allusion, and figuration transforms into a preadolescent coup d’état by scythe quajumprope. It is, after all, Baghdad’s people that will make it modern, not shapes on canvasses.

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Not all artists stuck to the manifesto’s vision. No work in the exhibition better complicates the BMAG’s attempts to negotiate between past and present, image and word, and figuration and abstraction, than Fouad Jihad’s Soil, Sword and Emerald (1970). 

The first thing you see are the mascara-laden eyes staring back at you—the sole morsel of realism the painting offers. Then you notice the bejewelled niqab that can best be described as chartreuse, then the halo topped by a crescent and star that recedes into the compositional focal point of the painting’s top half: heavy impasto that evokes a cracked, dried earth, long subject to the ferocity of the Arabian sun. The gilt color palette references the tempera-on-panel masterpieces of Byzantine iconography and pre-Quattrocento Italian portraiture. (Jihad’s self-conscious homage only made itself clear after my third viewing, when I finally spotted the nude woman sporting a nimbus and resting furtively atop the Arabic calligraphic panel on the center left, as though he plucked her out of something in the Met’s Lehman Collection.)

The niqabi demiurge gazes upon us as we contemplate the grisly scene laid out before her. Members of a royal court look on as a young man’s dismembered, plague-ridden arms are splayed out before him in a makeshift coliseum. A bloodied sword rests next to him, and its sheath appears suspended atop the head of one of his well-dressed executioners to his right. Soil, Sword, and Emerald takes place in no time in particular: Mesopotamia? Byzantium? A proleptic glimpse of the infamous Ba’ath Party purges in 1979? Nor does it cohere stylistically: the impasto of the top half transforms into the thin, controlled brushwork of the emerald hills below. Is this a moral tale, or merely a provocation? What is clear is that all the impulses that drove the BMAG vision––to make art that was modern yet firmly rooted in the past, formally inventive yet evocative of traditional motifs, towing the line between abstraction and figuration––melt away in this work, simultaneously an undeniable product of the movement and a totem that is impossible to categorize. What is certain is that it is beautiful, and somehow belongs precisely where it does in the exhibition. 

The BMAG’s final exhibition was in 1975, but All Manner of Experiments ends with a collection of works produced by Iraqi artists who continued where the BMAG left off. Shabout refers to these artists as the Eighties Generation, who practiced during years “that witnessed the isolation and destruction of Iraq’s political, cultural, and civic institutions and were punctuated by the Iran-Iraq War, the UN-backed sanctions, the Gulf Wars, and the US-led invasion of Iraq.” Many of these artists chose to live in exile. Not Shakir Hassan Al Said, who continued to teach and practice in Baghdad until his death in 2004. The exhibition ends with a spare, taupe painting of his, filled with empty space and scratched traces of words, barring the boldness of the Arabic letter waw at its center—the letter used to mean “and.” The Victorious (1983) was painted in the midst of the misery of the Iran-Iraq War and employs Al Said’s post-BMAG reformulation of istilham alturath, which he called istilham alharf: seeking inspiration from the letter. Al Said, whose Eighties Generation work was steeped in Sufist themes and symbolism, found a natural starting point for his rejuvenated practice in the Arabic letter, imbued as it is with the Qur’an’s linguistic sanctification. It is in this light that Al Said’s “and” seems to be calling out to BMAG members both living and dead, resolute in its stance that despite the annihilation of the Iraq that raised and nurtured the Baghdad Modern Art Group, the conversation will go on. 

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