Footnotes

"""""I learnt from Hussain how to achieve victory while being oppressed""""
- Mahatma Gandhi

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Germany
Acquired directly from the artist by a German businessman, Iraq, 1965

Vigorous, dynamic and intense, "Shimr and the Shahid" is a seminal work by one of Iraq's most enigmatic modern artists, Kadhim Hayder. Being offered in the market for the first time, the work comes from a prestigious German collection of Iraqi art, having been presented directly by the artist to the present owner in Iraq in the 1960's.

Kadhim Hayder was a master of weaving symbolism, poetic allegory and abstraction into compositions that were predominantly narrative in subject matter. As a poet, he had a lifelong fascination with the Shi'ite epic of the Martyrdom of Imam Hussein and this episode forms the subject matter of his most significant body of work, "The Epic of the Martyr" which was exhibited in 1965, the same year as the present composition, at the National Museum of Modern Art. A popular subject in Shi'ite folklore, the story of Hussein's martyrdom has been a subject of both art and popular religious expression for centuries

The present work must therefore be understood in reference to Hayder's wider cycle of works dealing with the battle of Karbala; in other compositions from the cycle, the white horses of Imam Hussein are seen mourning the death of their Martyr beneath an ominous moon. In the present work, the devious "Shimr", who slaughtered Hussein, is mounted on horseback in the background; the key "villain" of popular passion plays, Shimr and his horse were always depicted draped in red garb, in opposition to the pious green colouring of the Imam himself. In front of Shimr stands an un-named soldier making a final but hopeless stand against the Umayyad onslaught.

THE ARTIST: KADHIM HAYDER

Kadhim Hayder studied literature at the Higher Institute for Teachers; in 1957 he earned a diploma from the Institute of Fine Arts. Between 1959 and 1962 he studied theatre design at the Central College of the Arts in London. Upon returning to Iraq, he taught at the Institute of Fine Arts, opening a department of design. He continued to teach at the Academy of Fine Arts, when it replaced the Institute of Fine Arts; his book al-Takhtit wa Elwan (Sketching and Colours) became standard reading for students there. In 1971 he organized a group called the Academicians, based on an exhibition and around a text he wrote reclaiming a Platonic notion of the academy as a way to relate the different arts to each other, and to the arts of the past. He served as president of the Union of Iraqi Artists, the Union of Arab Artists, and the Society of Iraqi Plastic Artists.

Hayder began showing work while he was still a student, at a number of collective exhibitions held at Nadi al-Mansur, the major exhibition space in Baghdad during the 1950s. When his work and that of other young artists was rejected for exhibition at Nadi al-Mansur in 1958, he organized a counter-exhibition of the rejected. He also displayed his work at Al-Wasiti Gallery in Baghdad in 1964, and in 1965 he exhibited the series The Epic of the Martyr at the National Museum of Modern Art. Selected works from the series were subsequently shown in Beirut, both on their own, and as a prominent part of a collective exhibition of work by Iraqi artists at the Sursock Museum, a show that toured a number of European capitals under the sponsorship of the Gulbenkian Foundation.

His work was included in many major exhibitions throughout the 1970s, such as the First Arab Biennale, Baghdad, 1974; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1976; and the International Art Exhibition for Palestine held in Beirut, 1978. In 1984 he held a final solo show at the Iraqi Cultural Centre in London. His work was quickly acquired by private collectors, and thus it is only in recent years that it has entered public collections beside that of the Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, such as that of the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah, and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Arab Art in Doha.