Text by Dr Ahmed Naji, independent researcher and cultural advisor on art in Iraq and the Arab world

The founder of the Department of Painting and Sculpture in 1939, Faeq Hassan was a prolific artist and an inspiring educator who devoted his life to painting. His career and oeuvre could be considered as a unique case study for art education in modern nation states like Iraq. Born and raised in Baghdad an orphan from a poor family, his talent was noticed by chance by King Faisal I, the founder of the modern Iraqi state, who was impressed and promised young Hassan a scholarship to study art in Europe. Hassan was sent in 1935 to study art in Paris on a scholarship funded by the Iraqi government and over 5 years, received traditional art education while experiencing European modernism exemplified by Matisse amongst others. Upon his return to Iraq in 1938, he was appointed as a lecturer at the Teachers’ Higher Institute in Baghdad, then tasked to found the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Fine Art Institute. From 1939 to 1962, Hassan developed art education in Baghdad, until the subsequent formation of the Academy of Fine Art in 1958-1959 (later affiliated with Baghdad University) and was conferred Professor of Art.

Hassan is credited with forming one of the first art groups in Iraq in late 1940s under the name Société Primitive, which was also known as Ar-Ruwaad (The Pioneers) and they held their first group exhibition in 1950. Between the onset of art education in Iraq in 1939 to the maturation of a significant national art movement in the mid-1960s, Hassan enjoyed a dynamic competitive interaction with two other artist-educators: Jewad Selim (1919-1961) and Hafidh al-Droubi (1941-1991) and their respective art groups, Baghdad Modern Art (1951) and the Impressionists (1953). During this period, Hassan experimented with different art styles while concentrating on one theme: the Iraqi locale, formed with a technique-based vision. As Nazar Salim noted, ‘He is a skillful master who knows the secrets of colours and forms – so skillful that he approximates to the master of the Renaissance.’

The Water Carriers, 1957
This painting offers an exceptional insight on Faeq Hassan as a master teacher of painting, featuring a distinctive local Iraqi scene of two women carrying traditional copper brass jugs on their shoulders, used variably in Iraq until late 1950s to transport clean water for washing, cooking and drinking (see figure 1). The geometric forms of the jugs initiate a starting point for the planar rendering of the women figures in his 1950s quasi-cubist, architectonic abstraction. The colourist master-teacher captures the earthen atmosphere with different shades of beige and browns between the skin colour of the women and their landscape. Hassan utilises the red and pink tones as the focal point of the painting, as he considers red to be ‘the centre of the image and its vibrancy as it attracts attention more than any other colour. However, the red is never alone as it is linked to a certain group of colours’ as we see in the contrasting lilacs and blues as well as the harmonising greys. Geometrically, the round faces form the centre of a golden spiral (a logarithmic spiral whose growth factor is based on the golden ratio) propagated by the crescent-shaped veil, and the suspension of their cloaks [abayas] from their L-shaped arms supporting the base of the water-filled heavy copper brass jar.

This painting was exhibited in a historic exhibition at Baghdad’s Royal Olympic Club in 1957 organised by the Iraqi Artists Association (founded in 1956), that combined works by artists and architects to showcase the state-of-art artistic development in Iraq. Although there is a lack of documentary material on this exhibition, rare documentary footage was uploaded on YouTube in April 2020 where Faeq Hassan appears with five of his paintings including The Water Carriers (al-mal-laa-‘aat) which was spotlighted with its name mentioned in the voiceover commentary (fig. 2). This was the second notable exhibition by the Iraqi Artists Association after its annual exhibition at al-Mansour Club, where Hassan had exhibited a painting depicting two cloaked women with a comparable architectonic composition and a darker palette of the same colours (brown, red, lilac, blue), as the subject of this painting is the women who sell buffalo cream at dawn in Baghdad (fig.3).

Both exhibitions at the Royal Olympic Club and al-Mansour club in 1957 are historically significant as they represented the official recognition of the art movement in Iraq by the state. King Faisal II inaugurated both exhibitions, however the Royal Olympic Club exhibition stands out as the only recorded exhibition attended by the prominent modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright (fig.4). Wright visited Iraq after an invitation by the Development Board of Iraq to propose his Plan for Greater Baghdad which included designs for an opera house and a university campus, amongst other projects.

The Water Carriers, at its most superficial surface, may reflect a local Iraqi scene from a modernised medieval Baghdad of 1950s. But within its deeper layers of paint, it reflects the life of its maker and his bygone era. Hassan left us with this lesson: ‘Above all, a painting is the mirror of life and of the artist. Time will discard it certainly if it is false, but it will survive if it is true and has an intimate relation with humanity and reality.’ This painting certainly has an intimate relation with humanity and reality from its inception at the classroom of Faeq Hassan the teacher, to the bustling exhibition halls of the Royal Olympic Club in 1957 with Faeq Hassan the modern master, and beyond.

Dr Ahmed Naji is an independent researcher and cultural advisor on art in Iraq and the Arab world. He is the author of Under the Palm Trees: Modern Iraqi Art with Mohamed Makiya and Jewad Selim, Rizzoli, New York 2019.


1 SALĪM, N. [1977]. Iraq contemporary art 1, 1. Lausanne, Sartec, p. 71.
2 Ibid.
3 The golden ration was used by twentieth-century artists such as Le Corbusier and Salvador Dali in developing the aesthetics of their work.
4 Jaleel Kamal al-Din, "Exhibition of the Iraqi Artists' Society: the Spring of Art in Baghdad," in Modern Art Iraq Archive, Item #225, https://artiraq.org/maia/items/show/225 (accessed October 24, 2020).
5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtdzUGAY3NQ=4s.
6 Ibid.