Jewad Selim

Jewad Selim (1919 to 1961) was an Iraqi sculptor, painter and draughtsman. Born in Ankara, Turkey, he was schooled and based in Baghdad. He made sculpture in wood and in bronze, drew, and painted in mixed media on hardboard.

Baghdadiat (1956), a horizontal panel in mixed media on hardboard, and Children's Games (1953) both date from the 1950s, while Motherhood (1952) is a sculpture in wood. He designed the Freedom Monument in Tahrir Square, Baghdad, commissioned after 14 July 1958. Its bronze was cast in Italy in 1959 with Mohammed Ghani Hikmat assisting, and it was inaugurated on 16 July 1961, after his death.

Selim's training took him to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1938 and to Rome in 1939, where the Second World War cut his studies short. From 1946 to 1949 he studied at the Slade School in London. He taught at Baghdad's Institute of Fine Arts and from 1949 headed its Department of Sculpture. He was a member of the Society of the Friends of Art, set up in 1941. In 1951 he and Shakir Hassan Al Said formed the Baghdad Modern Art Group, and in 1956 he helped found the Society of Iraqi Plastic Artists. Mathaf, Doha, and the National Museum of Modern Art, Baghdad, hold his work.