Iraq's Modern Art at the Hessel Museum at Bard College.

[NNadir]

Last edited Mon Jul 21, 2025, 06:19 PM - Edit history (1)

When I first saw her across the room, I thought my girlfriend of the last 41 years, to whom I've been married for close to 40, was extremely beautiful, but then again, as a puerile young man, I didn't actually know what beauty actually was, but she was kind enough to spend four decades teaching me all about it. She did so most recently weekend, by discovering, from being on the email list of the art magazine, where she learned of Hyperallergic, the Upstate Art Weekend devoted to the Hudson Valley Art Scene and suggested, at the last minute, we go.

So we did, the pains of my aging set aside to see.

During two days of touring open studios, galleries and museums, we took in two excellent University museums, that at Vassar and that at Bard, the latter being the school where Donald Fagen and Walter Becker came together to found Steely Dan.

At Bard, at its Hessel Museum of Art its there is a show featuring Iraqi art, a show entitled All Manner of Experiments: Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group.

Iraq, of course, is a country destroyed, chiefly by the agency of the United States, by oil politics, and to be honest, in this magnificent show of Iraqi art, this willful destruction does not take a central focus - as perhaps it shouldn't - but one can see a vibrant culture of highly talented human beings, caught in the maelstrom of horrible violence.

One of the paintings on display there that kind of blew my mind, perhaps because it recalled the work of one of my favorite artists, Max Beckmann, was this one:



It's a 1946 painting by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, once untitled but now titled "Three Figures."

(I am unaware of whether Jabra and Beckmann were familiar with one another. It seems possible: )

A prominent intellectual in Arab modernism, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra was a prolific artist, writer and cultural critic of Palestinian origin but who spent many of his active years in Iraq. His surviving works from the 1940s offer a window into Palestinian life prior his own exile in 1948 and subsequent move to Baghdad. In 1948, Jabra received a Master’s degree in English Literature from Cambridge University in England, and took a teaching position at the University of Baghdad. His active participation in the 1950s with Jewad Selim and the Baghdad Modern Art Group, later led him to write a book on the artist that became a foundational work in modern Arab art history and criticism. He served as an official in publications for the Iraq Petroleum Company in Baghdad in from 1954 to 1977. In 1982, he co-wrote with Abdur Rahman Munif the novel ‘Ālam bi-lā kharā’iṭ (A World Without Maps). As a novelist and critic, his writing received widespread academic interest. In 2010, his home was destroyed in a car bomb attack which killed a number of his relatives, his personal library of hundreds of books as well as his collection of art that included works by Shakir Hassan Al Said and Mohammed Ghani Hikmat.

BarjeelArtFoundation

I hate war, particularly war in service to petroleum interests.

If you're in the area, go to this show. It's powerful.

Admission is free.

[IbogaProject]

1. Bob Dylan was a janitor at Bard one school year

That is where his style expanded and how he became connected with the music scene up there. Around 1963, not much written about it as he may have still played some gigs in NYC then.

[c-rational]

2. Thank you for this post NNadir. Bookmarked. My childhood friend moved up to Hudson last year.

[bif]

3. How long will the show run?

My daughter is going to be near there later this summer.

[NNadir]

4. I believe through October. If she is going to be in the area, I...

...also recommend the wonderful Vassar University museum, which, as an environmentalist, struck me powerfully, although the reasons it's so struck me may be arcane.