Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from the collection of George Edwin Wishon, American Cultural Attache in Iraq, circa 1970
Thence by descent to the present owner


"In the introduction of the exhibition catalogue of a show I had in Washington D.C. that talked about the use of calligraphy in my works, the curator wrote that he could not see Arabic calligraphy in my works but rather a series of 'signs'. That statement gave me more confidence in what I was doing. By trying to produce an art that is accessible to everyone I was not only attempting to bridge the contemporary and the ancient, but also to bridge Western and Eastern art"
- Dia Azzawi


HURRUFIYA - THE ART OF THE WORD

"They deconstruct writing, exploit the letter and turn it into a lexical sign of calligraphy, tradition and cultural heritage. As the sign is purely aesthetic, and only linguistic in its cultural association, it opens hitherto untraveled avenues for interpretation, and attracts different audiences, yet still maintains a link to the respective artist's own culture... Hurufiyya artists do away with the signifying function of language. The characters become pure signs, and temporarily emptied of their referential meaning, they become available for new meanings." Christiane Treichl

The Hurufiyya movement was an aesthetic movement that emerged in the late twentieth century amongst Arabian and North African artists, who used their understanding of traditional Islamic calligraphy, within the precepts of modern art. By combining tradition and modernity, these artists worked towards developing a Pan-Arab visual language, which instilled a sense of national identity in their respective nation states, at a time when many of these states where shaking off colonial rule and asserting their independence.

They adopted the same name as the Hurufi, an approach of Sufism which emerged in the late 14th–early 15th century. Art historian, Dagher, has described hurufiyya as the most important movement to emerge in the Arab art world in the 20th-century.

The term, hurifiyya is derived from the Arabic term, harf which means letter (as in a letter of the alphabet). When the term is used to describe an contemporary art movement, it explicitly references a Medieval system of teaching involving political theology and lettrism. In this theology, letters were seen as primordial signifiers and manipulators of the cosmos. Thus, the term is charged with Sufi intellectual and esoteric meaning.

Traditional hurufi art was bound by strict rules, which amongst other things, confined calligraphy to devotional works and prohibited the representation of humans in manuscripts. Practising calligraphers trained with a master for many years in order to learn both the technique and the rules governing calligraphy. Contemporary hurufiyya artists broke free from these rules, allowing Arabic letters to be deconstructed, altered and included in abstract artworks

Some scholars have suggested that Madiha Omar, who was active in the US and Baghdad from the mid-1940s, was the pioneer of the movement, since she was the first to explore the use of Arabic script in a contemporary art context in the 1940s and exhibited hurufiyya-inspired works in Washington in 1949. It is clear that by the early 1950s, a number of artists in different countries were experimenting with works based on calligraphy, including the Iraqi painters Dia Azzawi and Shakir Hassan Al-Said who were pioneers in experimenting with the graphic possibilities of using Arabic characters.