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Lot Essay
Jewad Selim was at the height of his career in 1955, leading the Baghdad Modern Art Group at the peak of its influence. That year he completed a major relief of a bull and a woman farmer, widely regarded as the culminating work of his 'crescentic period', in which he fused Arab, Iraqi and modernist visual language through the recurring symbol of the crescent. He also continued to gain international recognition, with his earlier painting Nalini included in a government-organised travelling exhibition of Iraqi art in India. These achievements consolidated the reputation that would carry him, within a few years, to his best-known commission, the Freedom Monument in Baghdad.
This self-portrait, executed the same year, comes from the collection of Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, Selim’s former student at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad and assistant — the two would go on to work side by side casting the Freedom Monument, a project Hikmat assisted in completing with Lorna and Rifat Chaderji after Selim’s death in 1961. In 1955, their paths ran in parallel once more: while Selim's Nalini toured India, Hikmat exhibited in that same Iraqi Art Exhibition before departing for Rome to pursue his own studies in sculpture. The drawing thus carries the imprint of a formative year shared by teacher and student, preserved through the eyes of the pupil who would remain closest to Selim’s legacy.
The work itself captures a transitional moment in Selim's practice, offering an intimate study of the artist at a pivotal point in his life and career. Departing from his more official, public-facing compositions, the drawing shows him in a rare instant of intimacy and introspection. Rather than presenting a formal or monumental likeness, Selim turns his gaze upon himself through a loosely observed domestic interior, where the reflection of his face is surrounded by simply sketched objects, including a teapot and bowl. His features are defined by dense, concentrated strokes, particularly around the hair, beard, eyes and cheek, while his solemn and inquisitive gaze remains fixed upon his own reflection. By contrast, the surrounding objects are rendered through looping, gestural lines, their unfinished forms receding behind the intensity of the artist's face — a contrast that draws the viewer towards Selim's physiognomy while revealing the immediacy and spontaneity of his observation.
Particularly striking is Selim's choice to portray himself through a small, portable hand mirror, and the way this device shapes the very structure of the sheet, which in effect contains two self-portraits in one. The first is rendered with realist precision, dense in line and charged with psychological depth; the second, lower on the page, is more abstract and fleeting, its features dissolving into the still life of cups and coffee pot sketched behind it. The mirror thus becomes not merely a tool of observation but a means of doubling the self — one fixed and interior, the other dissolving into its surroundings.
The significance of the work is closely bound to its date of execution. In the autumn of 1955, Selim suffered a heart attack that confined him to bed for an extended period and marked the onset of the heart disease that would claim his life less than six years later. Following his illness, he devoted greater attention to painting and drawing. This transition was not without difficulty for an artist whose practice had long moved fluidly between sculpture and two-dimensional forms. In a letter to his friend Khaldoun Husri, he reflected on this tension: "My heaviest burden is to decide how to divide my energy between painting and sculpture. I think that someday I must give up one of them because my creative ability is split between the two. I am thinking of giving up painting for good" (N. Salim, Contemporary Iraqi Art, Lausanne 1977).
Against this context, the drawing offers a particularly revealing insight into Selim's artistic process. It demonstrates the extraordinary amount of expressive information he was able to extract from line alone: the physicality and volume that might previously have been achieved through sculptural form are here translated into the pressure, density, movement and rhythm of the drawn line. The dense modelling of the face contrasts with the more fluid treatment of the surrounding objects, creating a dialogue between solidity and movement, presence and incompletion — an image with the immediacy characteristic of drawing, yet retaining the sculptural sensibility that underpinned Selim's wider practice.
The work also anticipates Selim’s increasing engagement with his immediate surroundings. Rather than constructing an idealised or monumental self-portrait in the aftermath of his illness, he presents an intimate and almost diaristic glimpse into his domestic world. The modest scale and unfinished quality of the surrounding forms heighten this immediacy, while the smaller sketch at the bottom of the sheet suggests an artist engaged in continuous observation, recording and retrospection. In this way, Self-Portrait becomes more than a study of the artist's own likeness: it is a record of Selim's act of looking, capturing the intimate relationship between observation, line and artistic self-reflection at a decisive moment in his practice.
Born in 1919 in Baghdad, Jewad Selim grew up in Baghdad within an artistic family, and went on to study art across several European cities, including Paris, Rome and London. Between 1938 and 1940, he trained in sculpture and painting first in Paris and then in Rome, before the outbreak of the Second World War forced his return to Baghdad, where he taught at the Institute of Fine Arts. In 1946, he left again for London, spending the remainder of the decade at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied under Henry Moore and met his future wife, Lorna. These years in Europe, and in London especially, provided a vital foundation for the mature style he developed upon his return to Baghdad, where, in 1951, he co-founded the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, a movement that sought to reconcile modernist expression with indigenous cultural identity. Although Selim's life was cut tragically short at the age of forty-one, he remains one of the few Arab artists to have engaged so deeply with modern Western art while developing so profoundly original a response to it.
His work has been presented in exhibitions internationally and is held in several prominent institutional and private collections, including Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman; National Museum of Modern Art, Baghdad; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; and the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF), Beirut.
This self-portrait, executed the same year, comes from the collection of Mohammed Ghani Hikmat, Selim’s former student at the Institute of Fine Arts in Baghdad and assistant — the two would go on to work side by side casting the Freedom Monument, a project Hikmat assisted in completing with Lorna and Rifat Chaderji after Selim’s death in 1961. In 1955, their paths ran in parallel once more: while Selim's Nalini toured India, Hikmat exhibited in that same Iraqi Art Exhibition before departing for Rome to pursue his own studies in sculpture. The drawing thus carries the imprint of a formative year shared by teacher and student, preserved through the eyes of the pupil who would remain closest to Selim’s legacy.
The work itself captures a transitional moment in Selim's practice, offering an intimate study of the artist at a pivotal point in his life and career. Departing from his more official, public-facing compositions, the drawing shows him in a rare instant of intimacy and introspection. Rather than presenting a formal or monumental likeness, Selim turns his gaze upon himself through a loosely observed domestic interior, where the reflection of his face is surrounded by simply sketched objects, including a teapot and bowl. His features are defined by dense, concentrated strokes, particularly around the hair, beard, eyes and cheek, while his solemn and inquisitive gaze remains fixed upon his own reflection. By contrast, the surrounding objects are rendered through looping, gestural lines, their unfinished forms receding behind the intensity of the artist's face — a contrast that draws the viewer towards Selim's physiognomy while revealing the immediacy and spontaneity of his observation.
Particularly striking is Selim's choice to portray himself through a small, portable hand mirror, and the way this device shapes the very structure of the sheet, which in effect contains two self-portraits in one. The first is rendered with realist precision, dense in line and charged with psychological depth; the second, lower on the page, is more abstract and fleeting, its features dissolving into the still life of cups and coffee pot sketched behind it. The mirror thus becomes not merely a tool of observation but a means of doubling the self — one fixed and interior, the other dissolving into its surroundings.
The significance of the work is closely bound to its date of execution. In the autumn of 1955, Selim suffered a heart attack that confined him to bed for an extended period and marked the onset of the heart disease that would claim his life less than six years later. Following his illness, he devoted greater attention to painting and drawing. This transition was not without difficulty for an artist whose practice had long moved fluidly between sculpture and two-dimensional forms. In a letter to his friend Khaldoun Husri, he reflected on this tension: "My heaviest burden is to decide how to divide my energy between painting and sculpture. I think that someday I must give up one of them because my creative ability is split between the two. I am thinking of giving up painting for good" (N. Salim, Contemporary Iraqi Art, Lausanne 1977).
Against this context, the drawing offers a particularly revealing insight into Selim's artistic process. It demonstrates the extraordinary amount of expressive information he was able to extract from line alone: the physicality and volume that might previously have been achieved through sculptural form are here translated into the pressure, density, movement and rhythm of the drawn line. The dense modelling of the face contrasts with the more fluid treatment of the surrounding objects, creating a dialogue between solidity and movement, presence and incompletion — an image with the immediacy characteristic of drawing, yet retaining the sculptural sensibility that underpinned Selim's wider practice.
The work also anticipates Selim’s increasing engagement with his immediate surroundings. Rather than constructing an idealised or monumental self-portrait in the aftermath of his illness, he presents an intimate and almost diaristic glimpse into his domestic world. The modest scale and unfinished quality of the surrounding forms heighten this immediacy, while the smaller sketch at the bottom of the sheet suggests an artist engaged in continuous observation, recording and retrospection. In this way, Self-Portrait becomes more than a study of the artist's own likeness: it is a record of Selim's act of looking, capturing the intimate relationship between observation, line and artistic self-reflection at a decisive moment in his practice.
Born in 1919 in Baghdad, Jewad Selim grew up in Baghdad within an artistic family, and went on to study art across several European cities, including Paris, Rome and London. Between 1938 and 1940, he trained in sculpture and painting first in Paris and then in Rome, before the outbreak of the Second World War forced his return to Baghdad, where he taught at the Institute of Fine Arts. In 1946, he left again for London, spending the remainder of the decade at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied under Henry Moore and met his future wife, Lorna. These years in Europe, and in London especially, provided a vital foundation for the mature style he developed upon his return to Baghdad, where, in 1951, he co-founded the Baghdad Group for Modern Art, a movement that sought to reconcile modernist expression with indigenous cultural identity. Although Selim's life was cut tragically short at the age of forty-one, he remains one of the few Arab artists to have engaged so deeply with modern Western art while developing so profoundly original a response to it.
His work has been presented in exhibitions internationally and is held in several prominent institutional and private collections, including Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman; National Museum of Modern Art, Baghdad; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; and the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation (DAF), Beirut.