Imagine Baghdad in 1951. Not the war-ravaged cipher of Western headlines, but a buzzing capital of postcolonial promise, flush with ideas and aesthetic ambition. It’s here that a handful of artists—including sculptor Jewad Selim and philosopher-painter Shakir Hassan Al Said—launched the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, a collective devoted to charting a new path for Iraqi art. Their rallying cry? Istilham al turath—seek inspiration from heritage, but don’t stop there. Interrogate it. Abstract it. Drag it through the present.
Seventy-odd years later, that call still echoes, and now, for the first time in a US institution, the group’s legacy gets its due in “All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art,” on view June 21 through October 19 at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College. An opening reception will be held on Saturday, June 21, from 2pm to 5pm.
Curated by Nada Shabout (modern Iraqi art’s high priestess), Tiffany Floyd, and CCS Bard’s Lauren Cornell, the exhibition is less a retrospective than a reckoning. Anchored by rare works from the Group’s foundational period and supplemented by ephemera—manifestos, newsreels, brochures—it maps a generational dialogue among artists who dared to localize modernism without mimicking it. Islamic geometry, Mesopotamian motifs, and fractured figuration swirl through the galleries, sketching out an avant-garde born not in spite of empire but in answer to it.
This was a movement that fused history with revolution, heritage with rupture. That Selim died in 1961—before his National Monument in Baghdad could be finished—only added to the mythos. What followed was a fracturing, but not a fading. From the New Vision Group of the late ‘60s, which politicized the aesthetic with anti-imperialist zeal, to contemporary diaspora artists like Sadik Alfraji and Hanaa Malallah, the Baghdad Group’s DNA persists in paint, protest, and pedagogy.
Letters, Shakir Hassan Al Said, oil, gesso, cotton, linen, canvas, 1961. Courtesy Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.
The curators trace that lineage across decades, weaving in works through 2023 and treating membership not as a fixed roster but a porous circuit of influence. Expect sculptures by Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, sketches by Naziha Selim (Jewad’s sister and one of Iraq’s first female painters), and brooding canvases by Mahmoud Sabri. Artists like Walid Siti and Mahmoud Obaidi, shaped by war and exile, extend the Group’s questions into new geographies: What does it mean to make “Iraqi art” when the infrastructure that once supported it has been bombed into memory?
“All Manner of Experiments” is also a curatorial experiment in itself—collaborative, archival, unapologetically political. It resists the flattening impulse of Eurocentric art history and insists, instead, on a polyphonic modernism. One that includes Baghdad as a node, not a footnote.
Come for the bold colors and graphic linework. Stay for the radical vision of an Arab modernism unbowed by empire, insurgent in its form and fiercely alive. CCS Bard has done something here: not just remembered, but reanimated.