Two survival stories course through this exhibition. The first concerns an illuminated manuscript, which miraculously endured the burning and looting of Baghdad by Mongol invaders in 1258. The second involves a massive, decidedly modernist public monument in travertine, concrete, and bronze, which just as remarkably remains intact, on the biggest and most central square in the Iraqi capital, having withstood Saddam Hussein, a decade of sanctions, and the US-led devastation of the country since 2003. Neither of these artworks is physically present in the Hessel Museum of Art. But among the 141 objects by thirty artists on view, they are everywhere evoked in texts, models, and reproductions. And they set the show in motion, reaching back while projecting forward, creating a simulation in real time of istilham al-turath, an Arabic expression for taking inspiration from the past to create something new—which is both the curatorial premise of “All Manner of Experiments” and the raison d’être of its subject, the brief but dazzling Baghdad Modern Art Group.
The manuscript was a copy of the Maqamat al-Hariri, the “Assemblies” or “Impostures” of al-Hariri, a poet from Basra who collected fifty anecdotes—funny, tender, and profane—about an eloquent rogue named Abu Zayd al-Saruji. This edition, completed in 1237, was illustrated by Yahya al-Wasiti, a calligrapher from southern Iraq who, in ninety-six paintings of vivid color and exquisite line, captured a wealth of detail about daily life in the urban milieu of the Abbasid Empire. According to the scholar Nada Shabout, who organized “All Manner of Experiments” with the art historian Tiffany Floyd and the Hessel’s chief curator, Lauren Cornell, Wasiti’s Maqamat was the only example of the so-called Baghdad School of Painting to survive the city’s destruction.
Wind through the centuries and the manuscript landed in France, in the Bibliothèque nationale (a nineteenth-century French dragoman initially brought it home for his own library, part of a huge haul including nearly 800 manuscripts). In 1938, the French journal L’Illustration ran a series of reproductions of Wasiti’s illustrations (plus a handful of unrelated others from the fable collection Kalila wa Dimna). The Iraqi artist Atta Sabri, who was living in London, brought the journal back to Baghdad in 1941. He showed it to colleagues, including the artist Jewad Selim, who had been his student in middle school. Together they “copied, enlarged, and studied” Wasiti’s illustrations. For Selim, they became the foundation for a new art. Their influence ripples through the paintings, drawings, and sculptures on view.
Born in Ankara in 1919, Selim was the son of a military painter who trained in Istanbul. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed a few years later, the family, originally from Mosul, moved back to Iraq. By the time Selim came of age, he was drawn farther away to study: first to Paris, then to Rome, and eventually to the Slade in London. He returned home and founded the Baghdad Modern Art Group in 1951. Selim pointed directly to Wasiti’s illustrations as the inspiration for a practice of modern painting that centered Iraq (not Europe) and demanded the renewal of cultural traditions going back to Mesopotamia. For the next decade, Selim held to this idea and produced the best work of his career, including the whimsical paintings known as “Baghdadiat” and tougher abstract sculptures exploring motherhood and sacrifice, culminating in Nasb al-Hurriyah, or “Monument of Freedom,” which was under construction in 1961 when Selim died of a heart attack at the age of forty-two. The monument, a collaboration with the architect Rifat Chadirji, is still standing on Tahrir Square.
“All Manner of Experiments” seems torn over how to situate Selim. Is he the main character holding the collective together? Or one of several members, his genius sublimated to that of the group? The most compelling works in the exhibition are undeniably his, including sketches and sculptural reliefs in hammered copper, a bronze maquette, a marvelous work on paper of a woman with a sewing machine in one arm and a chicken in the other, and beautifully painted studies for larger mosaics, including Good and Evil, an Abstraction (1951). The delightful Children’s Games (1953), from the “Baghdadiat” series, combines diamond and crescent forms with six frames of kids flying kites, jumping rope, and playing with a ball and two bats. The same shapes repeat in Selim’s paintings and drawings grouped under the category hilaliyat, or “crescent-like,” which use ancient signs to make modern symbols.
But the show contains multitudes, and they are uneven. What unified the Baghdad Modern Art Group was not a style but a strategy, and that strategy yielded wildly different results. Selim is sandwiched between two trios. The first is formed of the other prominent members of the group: Shakir Hassan Al Said, who went on to create another collective exploring Sufism and the Arabic letter, which arguably deserves its own exhibition; Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, whose figurative sculptures came much later; and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a writer and critic from Palestine who is a literary giant but ill-served by one terrible painting, the garish Untitled (Three Figures) (1946). The other trio is Selim’s family: his wife Lorna, his brother Nizar, and his sister Naziha, none of whose works on view here are equal to his. Shabout, Floyd, and Cornell are too scrupulous to simplify the narrative—but it might have helped.
“All Manner” throws out one line of connection, to Uche Okeke and the Zaria Art Society in Nigeria. But why not others? One could easily link the Baghdad Modern Art Group to Ibrahim El-Salahi and the Khartoum School in Sudan, or the poets and painters of the journal Souffles in Morocco, or the artists associated with Aouchem in Algeria, who professed in their own manifesto to be a thousand years old and thoroughly modern. As a project, Selim’s renewal of heritage also echoes the artist and filmmaker Jalal Toufic’s theory of “the withdrawal of tradition passed a surpassing disaster,” the idea that in the wake of some overwhelming calamity (a war, an attack, an eruption of violence), cultural traditions would disappear, such that artists would need to step in and do the work of resurrecting those traditions. Why not set these two programs together?
The show’s first section is tight and richly archival, with exhibition posters, critical reviews, and blown-up postcards creating a glorious image of Baghdad in its heyday. But from there, it spills into two further parts, looking at how the group influenced subsequent generations of artists in Iraq and the diaspora. There are great pieces in those rooms (by Hanaa Malallah and Walid Siti, among others) but they are extraneous to the exhibition’s purpose. The nationalism of Selim’s day was fresh. It had the hope and joy of a newly independent country, a revolution won. But all of that was soon over, and thoroughly corrupted by the 1980s. The renewal of istilham al-turath was contingent, and it has yet to be revived.