“The people see artists working for days out in the open without fear of being attacked, and they start to feel safe,” says Iraqi government spokesman Tahseen al-Sheikhly. “We hope the paintings will be the first step toward returning beauty to Iraq.”

The murals are in bold primary colors and in soft pastels. They are pointillist, cubist, abstract, and realist. They depict rainbows, Rubik’s cubes, sailboats, Swiss peaks, palm groves, and pristine marshes. The paintings have a message directed at a people struggling to heal after two years of civil war. Doves burst through Iraqi flags beneath slogans such as “Yes to unity.” Murals of Sumerian kings, Ottoman-era street scenes, and ancient Tigris River waterwheels remind Iraqis of a common and glorious past. Other paintings show what might be if the violence stops: on Baghdad’s airport road, futuristic Baghdad cityscapes depict glimmering skyscrapers rising above spotless tree-lined boulevards.

Baqr al-Sheikh is a rising young star on the Iraqi art scene. He smokes Gauloises cigarettes and says he’s trying to pioneer a new style of abstract realism in his painting. “I paint the soft edges hard and the hard edges soft,” he says of his latest works. Al-Sheikh painted some of the earliest murals in Baghdad but has since soured on the project. “The murals show a glorified past and an impossible future,” says the 33-year-old artist. “They show everything except the modern-day reality. Where is the sewage and trash that litter Baghdad’s streets? We might have had new skyscrapers if billions of dollars of reconstruction money hadn’t been stolen and wasted. The artist’s job is to portray the world as it is, not spread propaganda for the government.”

On the other side is Qassim al-Sabti, one of Iraq’s best-known living artists. Al-Sabti has been a driving force behind the mural project since the beginning. Between exhibitions in New York, Paris, and one about to open this October in Tokyo, he has rallied his students at Baghdad’s Fine Arts Institute to use their talents to beautify the city.

He sips Orange Fanta in the shade at the Hawar Café, the legendary watering hole for Iraqi artists in Baghdad’s Waziriya district. Al-Sabti was against the war and opposes the ongoing US occupation, but many of the first murals he helped put up on Baghdad’s walls were paid for with American dollars. Other murals were paid for by the Iraqi government, “a gang of sectarian clerics, religious fundamentalists, and outright thieves,” in al-Sabti’s words. But he doesn’t mind.

“With these paintings, I am shaking the hand of my enemy,” he says. “Art becomes dialogue, and dialogue is our only hope. We need to make art, not war.”

"Baghdad's Unlikely Muralists" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.