Three monumental murals for Baghdad: Data from Mahmoud Sabri, Shams al-Din Faris, Ahmed al Numan study years in the USSR in context

Abstract

The first Iraqi undergraduate and postgraduate students to study monumental art came to Moscow in the early 1960s. Mahmoud Sabri (1927–2012) joined the Vasily Surikov Moscow State Academic Art Institute in 1960, Shams al-Din Faris (1937–83) and Ahmed al Numan (1939–2013) joined the Moscow State Stroganov Academy of Industrial and Applied Arts in 1961. In this article, I will address the subject of the graduation mural projects created by these three Iraqi artists within the ideological framework of socialist realism in art and art education in the USSR, and influenced also by their own historical and political environments. My aim is to answer various questions surrounding the historical framework of the murals, such as by whom, when, where and how they were created, why they became a manifestation of the students’ political and social experiences and hopes and why these grand projects were, unfortunately, never realized. Explaining the history of the artworks and artistic practice, I will argue that, as products of the final outcome of knowledge transfer at that time, these artworks are effectively documents of their era, responding to and reflecting their socio-historical contexts both in Iraq and in the USSR.