Biography
Dr. Khalid al-Jader was a highly active participant in the Iraqi modern art movement. Throughout his distinguished career, he held several prominent positions and memberships in art institutions and organisations. Al-Jader's work is known for its rural landscapes and village vistas rendered in sweeping brushstrokes. He was attracted to Impressionism, and his paintings exhibit many of its aesthetic devices. However, his exploration of style and subject matter transcended these aesthetic similarities in a search for what the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919–1994) might refer to as a distinct Iraqi quality.
A gifted student, al-Jader studied concurrently at the College of Law and the Institute of Fine Arts, graduating in 1946 with degrees in art and law. He then travelled to Paris on scholarship to study at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1954 and earned a Ph.D. in the History of Islamic Art from the Sorbonne.
Upon returning to Baghdad, al-Jader accepted the deanship at the Institute of Fine Arts, where he stayed for several years. In 1962 under the supervision of the president of Baghdad University, he founded the Academy of Fine Arts along with his colleagues Dr. Aziz Shalal Aziz and Dr. As'ad Abdul Razak, and later worked as its dean. He also held teaching positions at Queen Alia College in Baghdad, Iraq and the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. In the early 1960s, Al-Jader published a book entitled Glimpses of Iraqi Art, in which he traced the history of art in Iraq from antiquity to modernity. Through these administrative and academic activities, al-Jader demonstrated his engagement in developing an institutionalised form of art education in Iraq and the Arab world more generally.
Al-Jader was equally dedicated to his own artistic practice. His style throughout is so consistent that taken together they amount to a vision of Iraq. His loose, rough brushstrokes are accentuated by his use of contrasted, vibrant colors. Al-Jader's markets, streets, and villages are rendered with frenzied daubs of thick paint, making the canvas pulsate with latent energy. The human figures that populate his scenes are part of this rhythm as they conduct their daily lives. Their vitality merely adds to an already dynamic landscape. Although al-Jader's work consistently exhibited this dynamism, it reached a peak in his later paintings, where conflicting paintbrush strokes almost completely abstracted his scenes.
Al-Jader participated in many essential artists' collectives, including Al-Ruwad, the Impressionists, and the Iraqi Plastic Artists Society. In the 1970s, Al-Jader was also a founding member of the General Union of Arab Artists, where he held the secretary position. He also exhibited regularly, participating in several group exhibitions all over the world. These included Al-Wasiti Festival, the First Arab Biennial of Fine Arts, and shows in Paris, Cairo, Brussels, and Beirut. He also mounted a number of solo exhibitions in Baghdad (1955, 1979), East Berlin (1956), Prague (1960) and Bucharest (1968), and Riyadh (1970). His work was both domestically and internationally visible.
Al-Jader is valued as a meticulous painter. He also demonstrated this thoroughness in his administrative duties. He was known to have held his students and faculty to a very high standard. His work can be seen at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts in Amman.
