Islamic Modern Art: Yeah, It Exists

Every single Gulf nation is lousy, even Qatar. These are contemporary protectorates under American auspicious. But Qatar is the least lousy in an awful bunch.

Unlike the Saudi royals, the Qatar monarchy does not have the excesses and hedonism which rightly blights the image of Saudi Arabia. A footnote: unlike the literally thousands of Saudi princes ans princesses, the Qatar monarchy is significantly smaller and infinitesimal by Saudi standards. Polygamy is less practiced.

Qatar is also relatively liberal. Unlike Saudi, and live every other Gulf nation, it is not a Kingdom of Horrors adhering to the fanatical and repressive ideology of Wahhabi. But beyond that, Qatar does allow for some measure of democratic representation and a free press. And the government finances al jazeera, the most courageous and independent (though not on Qatari affairs, predictably) voice in the morbid Arab media landscape..

But Qatar also deserves praise beyond that. Saudi princes have squandered billions on casinos and brothels. But Qatar is using its money, natural gas not oil, to finance culture. But actual culture. Not the silly trash and imitation crap culture of Dubai, if you can call that culture. Or the importation culture of Abu Dhabi, which is paying Western museums to lend their names to domestic satellites.

Qatar is building homegrown centers of art which uphold Arab and Islamic art, provide a home for artists stifled in their own countries (like Iran), and encouraging local artists: Qatar recently opened a new museum of contemporary Arab art called Mathaf (or museum in Arabic):

Three exhibitions fill the museum and a sister lot built in the grounds of the Museum of Islamic Art for a show planned for 2012 by the Japanese pop artist, Takashi Murakami. The first, “Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art”, from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem, Sajjil, ana arabiy (“Record, I am an Arab”), shows a selection of the works that Sheikh Hassan has bought over the years, including four of the key pieces from the first Farsi sale, among them the top lot, Said’s 1934 work, “Les Chadoufs”.

In a second show, “Interventions”, the curators asked five living artists who are well represented in Sheikh Hassan’s collection to create new pieces. The drawings of life behind bars by Ibrahim Salahi, a Sudanese artist, hang alongside his most influential work, “Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams”, that dates back to 1962. The painting was kept rolled up in Khartoum during Mr Salahi’s years of imprisonment and exile and is on public display for the first time in more than four decades. Dia Azzawi, a Baghdadi artist living in London, has placed white roses made of resin and representing the Iraqi academics dead or missing since 2003 around the hooves of two bronze horses, symbols of the military defeat of Iraq. “Told, Untold, Retold”, the third show, brings together work by 23 contemporary artists. Among the most interesting are Jerusalem-born Steve Sabella’s photographs of Israeli and Palestinian men hardly distinguishable in their boxer shorts and the paintings on paper by Marwan Sahmarani, a Lebanese painter who was inspired by a famous 16th-century engraving by Albrecht Dürer.

More interesting than the inaugural exhibitions, though, is what Sheikh Hassan is trying to do with the Mathaf project. Buying art quickly brought him in contact with artists. Mr Salahi spent much of his exile in Qatar with Sheikh Hassan as his patron. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf war, he also began supporting Iraqi artists who could no longer sell their work at home, sending them canvasses and paints and even bringing two or three every year to live and work in Qatar at his expense. He has extensive holdings of two of the best Iraqi artists, Ismail Fattah, a realist sculptor from Basra, and Shakir Hassan al-Said, who studied in Paris and co-founded with Jewad Salim the Baghdad Modern Art group in 1951. Since the looting of the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, Sheikh Hassan’s collection of Iraqi art is the biggest in the world.

Here's are some of my favorite pieces of modern Arab art.

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Marwan Sahmarani

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Mahmoud Said

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Steve Sabella