Drawing Trees Instead of Tanks

Being in third grade can be challenging enough without living in a battle zone. Ahmed Saleem and his classmates in the war-torn town of Fallouja have seen a lot in their eight years.

But they’ve also seen a small ray of hope enter their lives in the form of a unique program aimed at bringing art to society’s most vulnerable. Some of Iraq’s best-known artists, including oil painter Hadi Mahood, have contributed their time and even found inspiration from their young charges.

“I wish they would come more often,” Ahmed said. “They taught me how to draw some nice things like trees and birds and animals. Things I’ve missed. Before, all I could think about was drawing tanks and soldiers.”

Amid the destruction and bloodshed, Iraqi artists have been trying to make a difference. They believe their country’s soul is crying out for the sort of healing their work represents -- a beacon of hope for a battered people.

For art critic Nizaar Rawi, a change in mentality has to start small, with Iraq’s children. His Baghdad-based group, the Contemporary Visual Arts Society, has organized the therapeutic art classes for children at four elementary schools, two in the Shiite Muslim-dominated Baghdad slum of Sadr City and two in primarily Sunni Muslim Fallouja.

“We picked these because of the high tension in these cities,” Rawi, 33, said. “The aim is to change children’s minds, to provide them with something tangible that is far from their everyday reality of war and killing.”

As part of the program, local artists have taught the youngsters to paint, draw, explore colors and tap into their creativity. The society, headed by a Sunni, a Shiite and a Christian, is also trying to send its message of unity by example.

Faaiq Ahmed, a 35-year-old photographer, is using a different medium. He’s helped stage an exhibition of posters from across Iraq’s religious, social and geographic spectrum.

“Artists play an important role building a bridge across the sectarian divide,” he said. “Each artist has their own viewpoint, but we also have a common viewpoint, which is art itself.”

Even as artists are helping to heal society’s scars, however, they’re nursing their own wounds suffered during Saddam Hussein’s presidency.

“Artists hold the soul of a nation,” said Mohammed Kinani, a professor of painting at Baghdad University’s College of Fine Arts. “Now we’re trying to get that back. The regime tried to kill that soul.”

A key division within Iraq’s arts community relates to the question of who collaborated with the Hussein regime and who did not -- a divide summed up by the terms Iraqi artists use for one another: “shadow artists,” for those who shunned the regime, and “presidential artists,” for those who cooperated.

As with many things in Iraq, however, the line is not clear. Many of those who worked on Hussein’s projects needed the experience. For years, he was Iraq’s art industry.

Art student Zahraa Raheem, 32, pulled out photographs of herself on a scaffold, taken when she was building a giant sculpture of Hussein. Even though she wasn’t a fan of the dictator, she said, she needed the work. “I probably faced a career of doing his statues, but the war came along,” Raheem said. “The way I see it, my conscience was saved by an act of God.”

Even many of those who rejected any contact with the regime sympathize with the tough choices artists had to make.

“We know they were forced to do things they didn’t believe in -- during those years you had to survive,” said artist Laith Ali Youssif, 52, enjoying a small glass of sweet, dark tea in Baghdad’s Al Shabinder coffee shop, a longtime hangout for artists and intellectuals. “But you also had to find a balance and avoid losing your integrity.”

Artists who stayed in Iraq under often tough conditions and those who fled overseas to live in relative luxury are also trying to come to terms with one another. Many of those who stayed say they welcome the returning exiles’ money and connections but resist their efforts to portray themselves as “real” Iraqi artists.

Then there are the lingering personal wounds. Hala Nife, 29, said her career prospects and her mental health were shattered after a cousin was beheaded in the 1980s for membership in the Dawa Party, a political group outlawed by Hussein.

“This is trying to capture how alone I felt during those years,” Nife said in a run-down gallery here as she worked on an oil painting of a young girl emerging from the darkness. “The regime was able to capture part of my soul.”

Shadow artists survived the tough years by keeping their work secret, restricting themselves to noncontroversial themes or retreating into the world of symbolism, color and abstract form. There were few buyers. For most, it was a labor of love.

“We relied on this sort of complex, deep art for two reasons,” Rawi said. “We didn’t like reality, the tangible forms that we were seeing around us. And since our government didn’t get it, they didn’t stop us.”

Paintings or photographs of the poor were out of bounds because they implicitly criticized Hussein for looting the nation and leaving his people to go hungry as he prospered. If the work was couched as a protest against the 1990s U.N. embargo, however, it was permissible. Likewise, any criticism of the military hit a nerve with the regime. But depictions of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war provided a way for artists to criticize militarism in general.

Color offered another outlet. In the code of shadow artists, blue symbolized the country’s ethnic Kurd minority and the atrocities it suffered under Hussein. Red represented the banned Communist Party. Black stood for sadness and pain, green for life and gray for moral ambiguity.

The regime had its own preferences, favoring bright, uplifting colors to suggest that life was good. It strongly favored green, the color of military uniforms, and hated yellow, which it associated with the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

At the Al Sadoon Street Gallery in downtown Baghdad, the difference between art done before and after the war is stark. A row of dusty, fading paintings from the Hussein days on display recently were dominated by “safe” themes, including mosques, camels, warriors on horseback, men reading the Koran, Bedouins in their tents.

Below them, at eye level, were works done in the last year, which began to poke at the collective unconscious, the blackness of the old order. A piece by local artist Allah Bashir showed a massive hand -- symbolic of the regime -- and the head of a beast, laden with horns, which represents the Iraqi people’s complicity in supporting Hussein.

Artists say the soul-searching in their community is that much more poignant because through their work they helped lend credibility to the regime.

Soon after coming to power, Hussein spent millions of dollars on festivals, exhibitions and general works of art in a bid to solidify his support in a country where art has played a prominent role for centuries. Only later, after his grip on the country tightened, did the focus increasingly shift to works of himself.

Artists and art critics who have studied Hussein’s psychology through art say that whenever he felt vulnerable, feared losing control over the country or suffered a military defeat, he compensated for his feelings of insecurity by making public images of himself even larger.

Over time, the few original artists commissioned to create Hussein sculptures and paintings grew to a flock and then a small army. With 90 palaces built in Iraq, there was plenty of work in depicting what Hussein considered the most perfect of all subjects -- himself -- in a variety of poses, including those modeled on Julius Caesar.

Artists who created “Saddams” were rewarded with money, prestige, cars and overseas trips at a time when ordinary Iraqis were languishing in poverty.

“A project would earn us 100 times our salary [as teachers], which at that time was only enough to buy us a cup of tea,” said Abbas Esawi, a sculptor in bronze.

Even for presidential artists, however, life could be nerve-racking. Minders camped in the artists’ studios to make sure they didn’t get too creative or deviate from accepted conventions. Sycophantic guards browbeat them into working faster, longer, harder -- afraid the boss might want it yesterday. And there was the festering worry that the piece might draw disapproval from Hussein, even years later.

“The night before I was going to deliver something, I couldn’t sleep and I’d get a fever,” Hadi Taai, a professor and creator of six Hussein sculptures, said as he sat in his looted studio-classroom amid broken seats, cracked windows and a termite path snaking up the front wall. “If he didn’t like it, you risked a beheading.”

Sculptors once sought to move a 15-foot-high statue of Hussein to a square in Baghdad. Several overpasses on the highway leading to the square were lower than that, but loyalists balked at the idea of laying Hussein on his side.

A debate raged for weeks until a compromise was reached: He would be moved at night under a cover, as if he were sleeping.

“It sounds absurd, but there was a lot of thought given to such things,” Taai said.

The fledgling arts program for children is a first step. Artists hope it won’t be overwhelmed before the roots can go stronger.

“We want to create a new environment for the children where they can feel happy and safe,” said art critic Rawi. “They are Iraq’s future, and we must protect them. It will take time, but we want a future we can be proud of, a future without fear or destruction.”

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Ammar Mohammed Fadhil in The Times’ Baghdad Bureau contributed to this report.