Dia al-Azzawi belongs to the generation of Arab artists who came of age both artistically and politically in the sixties. The ‘sixties generation’, as it came to be known in Iraq (as elsewhere in the Arab world) represents a radical turn in postcolonial artmaking that is marked by the ebbs and flows of the long sixties’ social and political vicissitudes. These were great times of national liberation, social emancipation, revolutions and disenchantments. But most importantly, for artists of this generation, these were utopian times of great faith in art’s revolutionary potential. Beirut was emerging as a nexus for intellectual debate, political contestation and aesthetic experimentation, which was invigorated by a transnational flow of Arab artists and intellectuals and enriched by the encounters between them: Egyptians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians who crossed paths in Beirut, meeting together and weaving in and out of the city’s flourishing art galleries, publishing industry and political movements. For a young artist like Azzawi, Beirut was pregnant with promise. The Iraqi artist’s connections with Beirut developed along two distinct circuits that converged and diverged during the sixties.
From Baghdad To Beirut By Way Of Ancient Sumer
Gouache and China ink on paper, 52 x 32 cm
In Azzawi’s own words, Beirut was a ‘second capital for Iraqi artists’ during the sixties. The city’s thriving art galleries regularly put on show Baghdad’s pioneering modern art. Recalling his artistic debut, Azzawi notes how Beirut was more than just a chance for him to exhibit, but also, crucially, a space of encounter and exposure to art from across the Arab region. His first solo exhibition outside Iraq was held in 1966 in Beirut’s leading art venue, Gallery One. Established in 1963 by the poet Yusuf Al-Khal (1917–87) with his first wife, artist and critic Helen Al-Khal (1923–2009), this pioneering gallery space played a pivotal role in introducing Iraqi modern art to a Lebanese public of modern art enthusiasts. Gallery One’s Baghdad connection built upon Yusuf Al-Khal’s transnational network of Arab poets affiliated to his avant-garde journal Shi’r (1957–64; 1967–70). In particular, his friendship with the Palestinian-Iraqi poet, artist and critic, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1919–94), who was also active in the Baghdad Modern Art Group, introduced him to the country’s burgeoning modern art movement. It was during a trip to Baghdad in 1965 that Khal encountered the work of the young and emerging Azzawi.
Azzawi’s art at the time was thematically inspired by the epic of Gilgamesh and aesthetically referenced ancient Sumerian material culture. His early work was informed by his initial studies in archaeology and shaped by the artistic approach of his predecessors in Iraq, most notably Jewad Selim (1919–61) and the Baghdad Modern Art Group. While working within contemporary conceptions and techniques of modern art, Azzawi sought to recuperate an indigenous aesthetic, inspired by a local heritage of visual and material culture that dates as far back as Mesopotamian art. This revivalist aesthetic was commensurate with struggles for cultural decolonisation that have preoccupied artists and intellectuals in the Arab region, and in Asia and Africa more widely, from the mid-twentieth century onwards. In this fraught historical conjuncture, artists sought to reclaim a cultural identity in and through their practice – a sense of locality and pride in heritage suppressed by decades of European colonisation and Western hegemony. Azzawi’s artwork also intersected with contemporaneous endeavours in modernist Arabic poetry. Most relevant here is the revival of ancient Mesopotamian myths and symbols by the Tammuzi poets, especially as foregrounded in Shi’r by Khal. Thus Azzawi’s artistic approach caught the interest of Khal, who invited him to exhibit at Gallery One on more than one occasion. The Lebanese poet also published a selection of drawings by Azzawi, taken from his Studies for the Epic of Gilgamesh (1965–66), as companions to the book Epics and Legends in Sumerian Literature, which launched Silsilat al-Nafa’is by Dar an-Nahar in 1967. This short-lived, deluxe- editioned, book series – edited and curated by Khal – consisted of carefully revisited and illustrated Levantine classics of world literature, involving several prominent artists, including Paul Guiragossian (1926–93) and Shafic Abboud (1926–2004).
From Baghdad To Beirut By Way Of The Liberation Of Palestine
The second transnational circuit that connected Azzawi to Beirut was his solidarity with the Palestinian Resistance and the political turn that his art had taken at the close of the 1960s. The rise of the Palestinian liberation movement as a revolutionary armed struggle in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab Defeat would give an impetus to hope among an Arab population disenchanted by its political leaders and humiliated by the devasting losses of the war. The late sixties revolutionary turn in Palestinian and Arab affairs intersected with anti-imperial liberation movements that stretched their contours across the Global South, from Vietnam all the way to Cuba, and converged with New Left politics and radical civil rights and student movements globally. Beirut was in the eye of this globally interconnected storm. Aesthetic practices in the everyday life of the city’s cosmopolitan cultural and intellectual scene – in the form of literature, poetry, films, songs, art exhibitions, posters and other printed media – gave the Palestinian revolutionary momentum visual and material resonance in and outside Beirut through different circuits of transnational solidarity.
Palestinian revolutionary promise thus galvanised artists of Azzawi’s ‘sixties generation’ and politicised their artmaking. In 1969, Azzawi formed, with five other Iraqi artists, a collective under the name of the New Vision Group and proclaimed in a manifesto that modern art realises its revolutionary promise ‘towards a new vision’ by responding to political conditions with renewed aesthetic sensibility premised on a cosmopolitan framework of humanity and progressive Arab futurity. Shifting from the artistic framework that preoccupied the preceding generation, the group rejected what they saw as an ossification of cultural heritage in contemporary Arab pursuits in art.
The circulation of ideas about art and politics between Beirut and Baghdad was made possible in and through Arabic cultural periodicals and the mobility of artists and intellectuals across borders of Arab nation-states. Shi’r published the manifesto, Towards the New Vision, while Mawaqif – then newly founded by the leading poet, Adonis – ran interviews with and essays by Azzawi. In particular, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s periodical, al-Hadaf, provided a platform for the politicisation of art and, crucially, became a node in transnational circuits of solidarity. Its founding editor, Palestinian novelist, literary critic and activist Ghassan Kanafani (1936–72), acted as a conduit, bringing on board an emerging generation of Arab militant artists. Kanafani met Azzawi at the opening of his second solo show at Gallery One in 1969 and invited him to contribute to al-Hadaf just as the magazine was beginning to set sail.
By the turn of the decade, the city that exhibited the Iraqi artist in its elite art galleries and burgeoning art market, summoned him again through its radical imprints. Azzawi would join a host of contemporary Arab artists, including Kamal Boullata (1942–2019), Rafic Charaf (1932–2003) and Mona Saudi (1945– 2022), in giving the periodical an especially radical modern aesthetic feel. Following the assassination of Kanafani in 1972, Azzawi was invited to contribute drawings to a commemorative booklet published a year later. In Drawings for the Land of [Sad] Oranges, as the booklet was entitled, Azzawi abandoned the Sumerian myths that had inspired his early artwork and drew inspiration instead from the contemporary literature of Kanafani. Palestine’s liberation struggle and the poetry written of its plight now occupied his artistic vision and displaced the ancient myths and artefacts he had contemplated in the Iraqi National Museum. With this politico-aesthetic transformation, a shift in media and form also ensued. Azzawi set about new artistic experiments with image and text and explored the reproducibility of printed media, from posters to artist books, in articulating the new sensibility of this Arab revolutionary conjuncture.
Azzawi’s Baghdad-Beirut artistic itinerary and the circuits he traversed have shaped – and indeed have been shaped by – Beirut’s nodal configuration at the time. His itinerary carries more than a story of artistic beginnings. It elucidates how postcolonial artmaking developed beyond national borders and unravels the ways in which a city’s history is made by the transnational circuits through which artists and their artworks have journeyed.
