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“There are some times in the history of art when certain figures stimulate a way of thinking that brings in a lot of other people,” Iraqi author and scholar Kanan Makiya says about the “golden age” of Iraqi modern art.
“And suddenly, there are all kinds of new experiences, and new ways of seeing things emerge.”
The golden age of Iraqi art
The 1950s and 1960s were a period of extraordinary creativity and production in Baghdad, when artists, architects and writers navigated a path between modernism and Iraqi tradition.
Jewad Selim produced the
Freedom Monument, a work drawing from both Picasso’s Cubism and Assyrian friezes, in Tahrir Square; Kadhim Hayder began his monumental painting cycle