In the early 1950s, in order to set the modern art then developing in Baghdad on a firmer, intellectual foundation, the artist Jawad Salim founded an art group. The art group was based on a problematization. On the one hand modern painting had a precedent, in the thirteenth-century manuscript illustrations of what is known as the Baghdad School; on the other hand however, that tradition had been lost, and thus painting was something entirely new. Salim resolved this paradox by interpreting modern painting as a “renewal” [tajdid] of the medieval tradition, and he institutionalized this interpretation in the art group he founded, the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, which announced its formation as “the re-birth of the Baghdad School.” The interpretation of renewal emplotted modern art in the general philosophy of history formulated by the Arab Awakening, or Nahda, in which the history of the Arabs was interpreted in terms of civilizational decline and re-birth. The emergence of a political consciousness among the Arabic-speaking populations of the Ottoman Empire entailed a new historiography of the Abbasid caliphate. While that historiography provided a foundation for the new state of Iraq, it also undermined the national schema, by positing reference points that were not those of the nation but of time. In the context of the Nahda, modern art was structured according to a temporal logic, rather than a national one, conceived in terms of continuity and discontinuity, loss and creation, the inaccessibility of the past and the urgency of the present. To make this argument, I look at a series of paintings Salim did throughout the 1950s called Baghdadiyyat. I show how Salim’s artistic problem was how to give form to the general sense of vitality that permeated the Nahda, the sense of an awakening-to-life after centuries of death, a desire for life in the face of death. And I show how he drew on different figures of feminine sexuality in order to work through this problem of life. I suggest that sexual desire seemed to articulate both the impersonal thrust of life and the individual desire for freedom.