Jawad Saleem

Jawad Saleem is universally regarded as the father of modern Iraqi visual art. Born in Ankara to an artistic Iraqi family from Mosul, he studied sculpture in Paris, Rome, and the Slade School in London. In 1951, he co-founded the Baghdad Modern Art Group (Jama'at Baghdad li-al-Fann al-Hadith), issuing a manifesto that called for art that synthesized modern aesthetics with ancient Mesopotamian and Islamic heritage (istilham al-turath).

His crowning masterpiece is the bronze bas-relief frieze of the Monument of Freedom (Nasb al-Hurriyah) in Baghdad's Tahrir Square, completed in 1961. Spanning fifty meters in length and depicting Iraq's struggle for liberation from monarchy and imperialism, the intense physical labor of creating it led to a fatal heart attack at just forty-one.