Faiq Hassan

Faiq Hassan (1914 to 1992) was an Iraqi painter, born in Baghdad; he died in Paris. He worked mainly in oil. His subjects were villagers, workers, horse riders and landscapes, as in Village Scene (1958), now in the collection of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha.

Hassan was a teacher and an organiser of artists' groups in Baghdad. Until 1962 he directed the Institute of Fine Arts' Department of Painting and Sculpture. He founded Al-Ruwad in 1950; it began as the Société Primitive, Jewad Selim joined it and Naziha Selim was a founding member. In 1967 he formed a second group, Al-Zawiya.

A government scholarship took him to Paris in 1933, and he took his degree at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1938. He showed with the Friends of Art Society in Baghdad in 1943 and in the Avicenna Exhibition there in 1952. Group shows of Iraqi art took his work to Beirut in 1964 and Washington, DC, in 1966. The Gulbenkian Foundation gave him its Golden Prize in Baghdad in 1964. The Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman, which holds his work, gave him a solo exhibition in 1986. In 2026 his work is in What Lingers in the Artist Mind: Experiments and Legacies of the Baghdad Modern Art Group at Mathaf.