Footnotes

"GOOD AND EVIL, AN ABSTRACTION" - A RARE AND MAGNIFICENT 1951 OIL PAINTING BY JEWAD SELIM COMMISSIONED FOR THE IRAQI RED CRESCENT SOCIETY

Provenance:
Property from the collection of the renowned architects Nizar Jawdat (1920-2017) and Ellen Jawdat (1921-2020), acquired directly from the artist, thence by descent to the present owners

Note:
The present work is a study for a tile mural planned for the entrance to the Iraqi Red Crescent Society headquarters in Baghdad, a building designed by Nizar and Ellen Jawdat

"The ladies of the Women's Red Crescent asked us to design the headquarters for their charitable society. It would occupy a prominent position on a main thoroughfare in the south of the city. In addition to their administrative offices, the project would incorporate their most ambitious charity, an orphanage for about 50 young girls.

Fresh from our studies and uncorrupted by caution, we designed a building that provided for their needs in a way that was new to Baghdad —a striking, functional modern design. Jawad Selim, now Iraq's foremost artist, agreed to design a mural in small ceramic, colored tiles that would fill the entrance wall to the offices: He produced an abstract design based on the theme of Good and Evil, which incorporated —appropriately, the symbol of the crescent moon."
- Unpublished Memoirs of Ellen Jawdat

"The spectacle of the sky overwhelms me. I am overwhelmed when I see a crescent moon or the sun in an immense sky"
- Joan Miro

Bonham's are proud to present perhaps one of the rarest and most sought-after Iraqi paintings to come to auction in recent history, from the father of Iraqi Modernism, Jewad Selim.

Selim painted Good and Evil in 1951 as a study for a mosaic-mural commissioned by the Iraqi Red Crescent society for their Baghdad headquarters, a building designed by the Jawdat's themselves. While the mural itself was never constructed the painting remained in the hands of the family since its composition and its appearance at international auction seventy years later marks an immensely important re-emergence of a major oil painting by Selim

Compositionally, Good and Evil is perhaps the archetypal Jewad Selim; painted at the zenith of his career, the work flawlessly expresses the aesthetic and conceptual agenda of the "Baghdad Group of Modern Art" which Jewad himself co-founded. The Baghdad group was defined by an attempt to reconcile the grand visual legacy of the past within the contemporary cultural and nationalistic narrative of 20th century Iraq.

Mixing traditional Iraqi and Islamic motifs with a modernist visual language, Selim weaves a form of "folk modernism" which is both vernacular and universal. Focusing on the florid landscape of downtown Baghdad, Selim's composition is populated with abstract interpretations of the humorous and extravagant characters encountered in Iraqi everyday life. Light-hearted and boisterous, the Good and Evil is in part a stylistically sophisticated example of a burgeoning modernist movement in Iraq and in part a playful take on the mood and feel of life in Baghdad.

The current work is the only known appearance at auction of a Jewad Selim composed with the artists iconic monochromatic silver backdrop, seen most prominently in his superlative painting, Baghdadiyat, now in the collection of the MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar.

Inspired both by indigenous artistic vocabulary and the great European modernists that Selim studied during his artistic training, Good and Evil seamlessly combines oriental and modernist motif's. The monochromatic background and abstracted line-drawn forms are reminiscent of Spanish modernist Joan Miro, who curiously also had a fascination with crescent forms and used them extensively in his compositions on the constellations.

The star and crescent motif itself is a common feature of Sumerian iconography, the crescent usually being associated with the moon god Sin (Nanna) and the star with Ishtar (Inanna), often placed alongside the sun disk of Shamash. In this manner, Selim demonstrates his ability to simultaneously borrow from ancient and modern artistic traditions.

Selim's subject matter, an abstract interpretation on the struggle between Good and Evil, is a perennial component of ancient Mesopotamian art and mythology. A slender, horned, devil like figure towers almost comically on the left-hand side of the composition, while more benign winged creatures float on the foreground.

The iconography of the ancient Middle East is rife in precisely this kind of abstracted "dualism", specifically in the ancient Zoroastrian tradition where the universe was characterised as a constant struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. Selim's composition therefore pays homage to a rich artistic legacy in a composition which deftly marries the ancient and the modern in his inimitable style.

Jewad Selim (1919-61)

It is impossible to understand the modern art movement in Iraq without taking into account the works of this pioneer sculptor and painter, who was undoubtedly the most influential artist in Iraq's modern art movement. To him, art was a tool to reassert national self-esteem and help build a distinctive Iraqi identity. He tried to formulate an intellectual definition for contemporary Iraqi art. In charting his country's contemporary social and political realities, he was committed to combining the indigenous historical and folkloric art forms, with contemporary Western trends.

Born in Ankara, Turkey in 1919 to Iraqi parents who moved to Baghdad in 1921, Jewad Selim came from a strongly artistic family: his father was an accomplished amateur painter, whose work was influenced by the European old masters, and his brother Nizar and sister Neziha were also accomplished painters, becoming well-known in their own right.

Jewad was sent to Europe on government scholarships to further his art education, first to Paris (1938-39) and then to Rome (1939-40). The effects of World War II resulted in Jewad cutting short his studies and returning to Baghdad, where he began part-time work at the Directorate of Antiquities, where he developed an appreciation and understanding of ancient art of his country, and he also taught at the Institute of Fine Arts and founded the sculpture department.

In 1946, he was sent to the Slade School of Art, London. At the Slade, Jewad met his future wife and fellow art student, Lorna. Jewad returned to Baghdad in 1949 to become Head of the Department of Sculpture at the Institute of Fine Arts, where he taught his students to draw on the heritage of their country to create a distinctive Iraqi style and artistic identity, which would become the ethos of an influential art movement just a few years later. In 1950 Lorna joined Jewad in Baghdad, where they were married.

In 1951, Jewad Selim formed The Baghdad Modern Art Group.. Modern Iraqi art began with the first exhibition of the Baghdad group where they announced the birth of a new school of art that would "serve local and international culture".

After painting his most mature works in the 1950s, the artist gave up painting and focussed on sculpture, the culmination of which was his Monument for Freedom in Tahrir Square in Baghdad of 1960-61. This was the largest monument built in Iraq in 2500 years ". The time frame presented by the President was unrealistic and the project did not run smoothly. Immense pressure was put on Jewad to finish his work and he suffered a heart-attack. He died one week later on 23rd January 1961 at the age of just forty-one, leaving a wife and two young daughters.

Jewad's early death in 1961 was a shock to the artistic community of Iraq, but his spirit remained and was reignited by a new wave of young artists returning from their studies abroad, who picked up his mantle of extending Iraqi art into the rest of the Arab world and internationally. Jewad had paved the way ahead.