“Question: how does a traveller from the Middle West presume to make a collection of contemporary art from a foreign country?” So queried Abby Weed Grey, a wealthy Minnesotan art collector, in 1966, during a series of trips through Iran, India, Turkey, Japan, and Pakistan. She returned several times in the following decade, amassing a collection of some 400 contemporary works of art. Grey was a devout Christian who wrote frequently in her diaries about her own personal devotional practices. As she put it in her journal, “perhaps there is only one great (poetic) response to Life: I am the beloved of God. Every movement, then, issuing, wholly holy.” It is clear that part of what drew her to travel across the Middle East and Asia was her belief that the artists of those countries shared her commitment to their personal religious beliefs. Yet Grey also had political goals for the paintings, sculptures, and works on paper she acquired. In her diaries, she identified herself as someone “publicly charged” and “a mediator between two cultures” in “a Sputnik World.” This goal led her to collaborate with arts institutions like the United States Information Service (USIS), the American Federation of Arts, and MoMA, with whom she organized traveling exhibitions in the US and abroad. How might we understand the combined imperatives—both religious and political—that drove Grey’s collecting practices in the 1960s and 70s? By placing Grey’s travel diaries in dialogue with writings and artworks by the artists with whom she met during her travels, this paper examines how “religion” and “modernity” served as evaluative categories that enabled the purchase, collection, and circulation of art objects in an international sphere.

Jewad Selim (1919-1961), Iraq’s leading modern artist and the co-founder of the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, invoked the notion of Istilham al-turath (seeking inspiration from tradition through renegotiation) to negotiate modernism in Iraqi art. Istilham became an important nucleus for modern Iraqi art on various levels. For Selim, it was a necessary aesthetic to forge continuity in Iraqi art by engaging with elements from Iraq’s different history chapters. Most importantly, Selim’s alternative mode of representation that, nevertheless, underlines presentation as was understood by Islamic art and its relationship to reality, registers his response to the crisis of representation cause by modernism. Negotiating the Islamic element in relationship to modernism and with reference to the Mesopotamian heritage allowed Selim to introduce modern iconic shapes, like his hilaliyat, to represent the city of Baghdad and its inhabitants in the modern period. Baghdad’s perceived and constructed contemporary popular culture, with its preservation of tradition and folklore, was his main emphasis. Selim negotiated a local style that drew on Iraqi folklore such as ceramic animals and patterns in rugs, that were equally contemporary. Through abstraction and a non-linear approach to repetition, Selim implemented an important aspect of Islamic aesthetics, based on interaction and juxtaposition of diverse units. This paper examines the notion of istilham al-turath in the work of Jewad Selim as an aesthetic that utilizes the decorative as the means to negotiate modernism.

The development of practice of modern art in Iraq during the 1950s was shaped on the one hand by an emerging public sphere, where newspapers and parties were provided the basis for new kinds of political activity, and on the other the question of how a modern practice of art would relate to a discontinuous history of art going back to ancient Mesopotamia. The conditions of art practice were abruptly transformed in 1963, when a coup by the Ba?ath Party, and the persecution of leftists that followed, brought about the collapse of the public sphere that had formed over the previous two decades. Art practice turned inward and came to be defined by a new set of concerns with method, technique and expression. That turn was first articulated by the artist Shakir Hassan Al Said in an artist statement published in Al-Jumhuriya in 1966, as a “struggle to arrive at the truth” that took the form of “a reconsideration of the artwork as a material available for contemplation and revelation of truth in all its dimensions.” This paper explores the ways in which Shakir Hassan Al Said turned to Islamic philosophy in order to develop a new critical theory of the artwork. In particular it focuses on a set of writings that Al Said published in the nineteen-sixties that sought to re-conceptualize the line in the artwork in terms of the medieval philosophy of Illuminationism [?Ishr?q?ya]. The paper situates this turn to Islamic philosophy for concepts against the background of the liberalism of the nineteen-fifties, when Al Said had been a central figure in the grounding of the modern artwork in the public sphere.