“Groundbreaking. Shabout elucidates two critical issues that have thus far received inadequate scholarly attention—the distinction between Islamic Art and Arab Art and the relatedness of the political and artistic processes in the history of Arab modernity.”—Shiva Balaghi, coeditor of Picturing Iran: Art, Society and Revolution "One of the first publications to consider the various cultural and social conditions that have helped shape Modern Arab Art as a recent phenomenon linked to the rise of Arab identity, the impact of western art training, and a search for a contemporary language which links with Islamic art but is discontinuous with it."--Fran Lloyd, Kingston University "Art is one way to visualize the interconnectedness of people and this book shows us how related in influence and aspirations we all are."--Linnea S. Hedrick, Miami University Modern Arab Art provides a historical and theoretical overview of the subject from the 1940s through today. With particular emphasis on production, reception, and the intersection between art and politics in Iraq and Palestine, Nada Shabout reveals the fallacy in Western fascination with Arab art as a timeless and exotic “other.”

Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics

Arts & Photography

Shabout, Nada M.

History & Criticism

University Press of Florida

In the mid twentieth century, artists in the newly independent nation of Iraq experimented with a form of Modernism that they saw as a new and revolutionary artistic idiom for a secular national state. Combining ancient and Islamic forms and genres of art and with Western Modernist influences, these artists set out to create an art for the people. At the same time, they participated in what they saw of Western Modernism by bringing to it older forms of Islamic abstraction. In this way, they challenged both traditional indigenous forms and what they learned from modern art in Europe. Today these works continue to challenge the pervasive image of Iraq as a country with no modern artistic past. As the exhibition curators and authors of the catalogue, Zainab Bahrani, the Edith Porada Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, and Nada Shabout, an associate professor of art history at the University of North Texas, make clear, there are several reasons Iraq's modern tradition remains little known abroad. Access to the artworks themselves is one problem: The Iraqi Museum of Modern Art was looted after the fall of Baghdad, and most modern and contemporary works are now in private collections. The catalogue offers an unprecedented overview of the work of several generations of Iraqi artists, from the mid-twentieth century to the present, including paintings, sculpture, book arts, and videos by forty-five artists, among them Jawad Salim, Dia Azzawi, Hana Malallah, Nazar Yahya, Kareem Risan, Ghassan Gha'eb, Rafa al Nasiri, and Mohammed al Shammarey.

Modernism and Iraq

Bahrani, Zainab

The Wallach Art Gallery

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Books by Shabout, Nada M.