Abstract
Kadhim Haidar was born in 1932 in Baghdad, Iraq. Whether through the example set by his work or in his capacity as a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts (أكاديميّة الفنون الجميل, Akadimiyat Al-Funun Al-Jamilah ) in Baghdad, Kadhim Haidar was one of the most influential modern artists in Iraq, inspiring the work of many artists throughout the 1960s and 70s. In the tumultuous years following the first Ba'ath coup in 1963, his series of paintings, The Epic of the Martyr, set a new paradigm for the practice of art, one in which various concepts and cultural symbols were retooled in the artwork to give form to contemporary experience. In addition to painting, printmaking, and sculpture, Haidar also designed sets and costumes for many theatre productions in Baghdad.
Biography
Growing up in the Fadhl neighbourhood of Baghdad, Haidar loved to draw. When the artist Mohammad Saleh Zaki (1888-1974) visited his elementary school and instructed the students to draw a fish, Haidar drew a fish in a peculiar way. Asked about how he drew the fish, he explained to Zaki that the fish was not yet dead.
Haidar studied literature at the Higher Institute of Teachers (Dar al-Mu'allimeen), Baghdad, and at the same time enrolled in night classes at the Institute of Fine Arts, (معهد الفنون الجميلة, Ma'had Al-Funun Al-Jamilah) Baghdad. He graduated from both institutes in 1957. In 1959, he went to London to study at the Central College of the Arts (now Central St. Martins), where he received degrees in painting, lithography, and theater design. Upon his return to Baghdad in 1962, he began teaching at the Institute of Fine Arts.
During the 1950s, Haidar was associated with the group of Pioneers (Al-Ruwad) artists. As with other artists in that group, such as Mahmoud Sabri, his work focused mainly on the figure of the urban labourer. Rendering the labourer with a superhuman musculature, his arms and legs almost chiselled in hard, clean lines, Haidar built into his modelling a mythic dimension that cast the labourer in a heroic struggle for justice. In paintings such as He Told Us How It Happened (1957) and The Struggle of the Hero (1958), where the figure of the labourer is projected onto the scene of the Battle of Karbala, Haidar explicitly portrayed him as a political and not simply economic subject, about the protests of workers, often against the high cost of living in Baghdad, that the government violently suppressed.
In the aftermath of the first Ba'ath coup in February 1963, Haidar began work on a series of paintings that drew on imagery from the street performances that annually mourn the martyrdom of Imam Husayn. He employed both modern techniques of design and aesthetic principles such as repetition derived from the art of ancient Mesopotamia to redesign the banners, personages, and horses that animate the processions and re-enactments of the Battle of Karbala, where Imam Husayn was killed along with the Prophet's family for refusing to acknowledge the right of Yezid to the caliphate. The painting neither depicted the ritual performances nor the historical events of the battle. Instead, following a process of semiotic abstraction, Haidar's aesthetic alterations diminished the ritual and historical significance. He allowed the imagery from the mourning ceremonies to work as a lexicon through which the artist articulated the plight of an unidentified martyr.
Following the use of poetry in the mourning rituals for Imam Husayn, he also composed a poem that recounted this struggle in modern verse, each painting in the series corresponding to a line of the poem. The vocabulary of forms employed in the paintings, coupled with the poem, nevertheless sustained in the modern artwork the same sense of pathos and the same claim to justice borne by the imagery in the mourning rituals. The sequence of 32 canvases of varying sizes was exhibited in April 1965 at the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad under The Epic of the Martyr (Malhamat ash-Shaheed).
Haidar saw himself continuing an earlier attempt to go beyond the technical limits of the artwork by incorporating the ritual imagery of the popular celebrations of Husayn's martyrdom. His first attempt to do this was in The Porter (al-Himal) (1955), where he portrayed an urban labourer carrying the trunk of a date palm by affixing the trunk of an actual date palm to the canvas. Inserting the date palm into the painting collapsed the representational distance between the artwork and the world—between the image of the labourer suffering under the weight of his load and the real world of modern Baghdad, which labourers had to endure. Similarly, in The Epic of the Martyr, the transposition of imagery from the mourning rituals into painting—even as that transposition suspended the historical and ritual reference of the imagery—collapsed the borders between the artwork and the mourning ceremonies, with the effect that the paintings came to be suffused with the pathos and testimony of the ritual remembrance of the martyrdom of the Imam Husayn. In the artwork, however, that pathos and testimony had to do not with the martyrdom of Imam Husayn but with the experience of the 1963 Ba'ath coup.
Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Haidar continued to develop the theme of testimony and martyrdom. However, he did so in ways that went beyond the ritual imagery of the mourning rituals to explore the mythological space produced by those acts of remembrance. The narrative content of these later paintings seemed to push their figurative form into a particular kind of abstraction. In addition, like many Iraqi artists, including Dia al-Azzawi (1939-), Rafa al-Nasiri (1940-2013), Ismail Fattah (1934-2004), and Ala Bashir (1939-), Haidar produced work in response to the massacre of Palestinians at the Tel al-Zaatar refugee camp in 1976. Some of that work was shown at the Second Arab Biennial Art in Rabat later that year. He also designed costumes and sets for several theatre productions directed by Sami Abdul Hamid (1928-2019) and Qasim Mohammad (1934-2009). Though he had designed his first set much earlier, in 1950, when Haqqi al-Shibli (1913-1985) asked him to paint backdrops for his production of Julius Caesar, it was only after Haidar met Sami Abdul Hamid (1928-2019) in London, where both of them were studying, that he became seriously involved in theatre design.
In 1967, Haidar participated in the al-Zawiya Group (the angle), a short-lived, one-exhibition-long reaction on the part of the faculty of the Institute of Fine Arts, of which he was a member, to the activities of their students, who had begun to push for more radical innovations in technique. That conflict over technique was suspended by the defeat of the Arab states in 1967 in the Six-Day War with Israel, which raised a set of new questions about how the practice of art could interface with regional politics. In response to the debates about both form and content that ensued, in 1971 Haidar arranged an exhibition at the National Museum of Modern Art of work by the young artists Waleed Sheet (1947-), Faisal Laibi Sahi (1947-), Nu'man Hadi (1943-), Silah Jihad (1947-2020), and Aqil Abd Al-Razk (1948-2023) under the title of the Academicians (al-Akaadeemiyyoun). In a curatorial text introducing the artists' work, Haidar sought to reclaim the concept of the 'academic' to refer to a practice of art in which 'the line is informed, planned out in advance with knowledge'—that is, a practice in which aesthetic form contains a hermeneutic content. Renewing the concept of the academic was also, he acknowledged an attempt to articulate what he had done almost a decade earlier in The Epic of the Martyr.
In addition to teaching at the Institute of Fine Arts, which became the Academy of Fine Arts when it was integrated into the University of Baghdad in 1968, and authoring a textbook,Lines and Colors (at-Takhteet wa al-Alwaan), Haidar held several leadership positions in both national and regional art organisations. He served as Vice-President of the Iraqi Plastic Art Society (,جمعية التشكيليين العراقيين Jam'iyyat al-tashkiliyyin al-'iraqiyyin) from 1968 to 1973. In 1975, he succeeded Khalid al-Jadir (1922-1988) as President of the General Union of Arab Artists (al-Ittihad al-‘amm li-l-fannanin at-tashkiliyin al-‘arab).
In 1983, Haidar was diagnosed with leukaemia and went to London for treatment. Though his strength returned for a few months, the cancer persisted, and Haidar was out of money. To help him fund a second round of treatment, Dia Azzawi, who was then the artistic director at the Iraqi Cultural Centre in London, arranged for Haidar to show some work at the centre. In addition to showing work from the previous few years, Haidar produced a series of oil paintings for the exhibition that interpreted the experience of his dying body. Thrown outside his body by the illness, he saw his body as something at once organic and mechanical, as a landscape of arteries and veins, pipes and branches exposed to the open air and merging with the clinical world of tubes and flowers that surrounded him in the hospital.
The exhibition brought Iraqi community members to the centre, who had hitherto stayed away for political reasons, and every work sold. Haidar was able to undergo a second round of treatment. He returned to Baghdad, where he continued to work, producing sketches and watercolour studies for large paintings. He passed away a few months later.
