The Baghdad Group for Modern Art was founded in 1951 after a dynamic period of change and growth in Iraq following the nation’s liberation from British rule in 1932.
At first glance, it would be difficult to discern this artwork as coming from Arab origins, and not Spain or France or America or Mexico. It’s Modern art. Bold colors. Distorted figures. Abstraction. Experimentation. A close inspection reveals distinctions. Arabic script. Prominent crescents.
This art is modern. It’s Arab. It’s Iraqi.
“All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art,” opening June 21, 2025, at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY presents the first in-depth examination of this essential chapter in Arab modern and contemporary art.
The group was founded in 1951 after a dynamic period of accelerated change and growth in Iraq following the nation’s liberation from British rule in 1932. During the 1930s and 40s, amid ongoing political turbulence, artists began a crucial negotiation between an emerging postcolonial national consciousness and a burgeoning modernism. It remained a creative force through the early 1970s.
“The artists of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art thought of themselves as international citizens carving contributions in an inclusive modern history through forging unique artistic identities,” Nada Shabout, a leading expert in modern Arab art and exhibition curator, said when announcing the show.
The exhibition invites audiences to learn about modernism from the vantage point of Iraq–a vibrant site of exchange and influence across West Asia, North Africa, and Europe–reframing Iraqi art and global modernism.
“The timeline that (Americans) understand in art history, when modernism was in Europe and in the US, is not necessarily global,” Shabout, who graduated from high school in Baghdad, told Forbes.com. “That’s not what was happening elsewhere in the world. This (exhibition) helps us correct that timeline. Our idea of what modernism and post-modernism are are not applicable everywhere because of the different dynamics of why things evolved and the way they evolved.”
Consider this: mid-century modernism in Iraq was heavily interested in Impressionism, despite European artists largely having worked through and worked on from Impressionism decades earlier. Were Iraqi artists behind?
Or, in fact, were Iraqi and Arab artists ahead?
“Europe in the late 19th century, early 20th century, with colonialism and Orientalism, (artists) were able to see examples of work that were completely different than what they were developing from the Renaissance on and made them completely abandoned naturalism and adopt abstraction,” Shabout said. “For Iraqis, as well as many others in the so-called post-colonial world, abstraction was in their heritage, so that naturalism and Impressionism, those styles were the new things that they experimented with.”
“Modern” is in the eye of the beholder and the maker.
Henri Matisse visited Morocco in the nineteen-teens. He was fascinated. The colors. The light. The textile patterns. He brought all of it into his artwork that was in every way considered Modern. It wouldn’t look so modern to Arab audiences familiar with those colors, and that light, and those patterns for centuries.
