Kadhim Hayder (Iraq, 1932-1985) How He Wandered with the Heart of a Martyr (From the Epic of the Martyr Series) oil on canvas, framed executed in 1963 127 x 176cm (50 x 69 5/16in). Footnotes: Provenance: Property from a private collection, England Formerly property from the collection of the renowned Iraqi architect Said Ali Madhloom (1921-2017) Acquired directly from the artist by the above Exhibited: The Marty's Epic, Kadhim Hayder, Baghdad National Museum, 1965 (the present work is composition No.6 from the cycle) The Marty's Epic, Kadhim Hayder, Sursock Museum, Beirut 1965 Published: Hiwar, Vol.3 No.3, Kadhim Hayder: Waddah Faris, 1965 (preparatory sketch) A MONUMENTAL 1963 MASTERPIECE FROM KADHIM HAYDER'S MARTYR'S EPIC: THE LARGEST COMPOSITION FROM THE SERIES EVER TO COME TO AUCTION 'The horse represents the knight, keeping with the popular belief that the horse carries the spirit of the knight after his martyrdom.' - Kadhim Hayder 'The exhibition of The Epic of the Martyr took place in circumstances that were politically and culturally complicated; it turned the idea of martyrdom into a modern symbol that cried out in tragedy apart from any religious interpretation.' - Dia al-Azzawi How He Wandered with the Heart of a Martyr, by Saleem Al-Bahloly How He Wandered with the Heart of a Martyr belongs to a landmark series of paintings shown at the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad the last week of April 1965 under the title The Epic of the Martyr. The series drew immediate critical acclaim for the way that the artist, Kadhim Haidar, was able to derive from popular culture not simply visual motifs to tailor the styles of modernism to the local context of Iraq but a means of expression for articulating the human condition. The human condition preoccupied artists and thinkers across the world in the middle of the twentieth-century; but in Iraq the concept of the human took on a particular significance following the persecution of leftists in the aftermath of the Baʿath coup in 1963. The Epic of the Martyr was so important largely because it demonstrated how artists could represent modern experience by drawing upon their cultural history. Haidar began working on the series in 1963 shortly after returning from London where he had studied printmaking and stage-design at the Royal College of Art. On the one hand, the paintings were a continuation of the interests of artists in the 1950s: in the inspiration Haidar found in popular culture and in his adoption of certain pictorial devices from ancient Assyrian sculpture to modern art (associated with the Baghdad Group for Modern Art) as well as in his concern with political struggles for justice (associated with the Pioneers art group). On the other hand, however, Haidar opened a new horizon for the practice of art by structuring the paintings around an act of symbolism. The paintings are composed of horses and warriors, wielding spears and swords and bearing banners and shields, that are positioned on a flat, mythical landscape. This imagery was drawn from the annual taʿziya celebrations that mourn the martyrdom of al-Husayn and other members of the Prophet's family in a stand-off with the Umayyad army in 680 AD; in particular, the imagery is taken from the processions in which a pageant of costumed figures representing characters from the battle fought on the 'plain' west of the Euphrates parade through the street accompanying poets who narrate in a vernacular tradition of verse the injustice suffered by the Prophet's family. In the paintings, this imagery has been reconstructed according to a variety of devices inspired by a range of sources: the bodies of the horses and figures are turned toward the viewer, as if they are appearing on a stage or in an ancient frieze depicting a historic battle; a sense of performance is carried into the image by the intense expressivity of their gestures which seem to dissolve anatomical features and the outline of shapes in a fervour of emotion; the limbs of human and animal bodies alike are often multiplied (an influence of Assyrian sculptural reliefs that Haider almost certainly saw at the British Museum in London) and tapered (a form of modelling inspired by the sculpture of Henry Moore). The reconstructed imagery is arranged in the paintings not to narrate a historical event but to elaborate a concept of the martyr that emerged out of that event—a hero who by his death in a struggle for truth paradoxically triumphs. Haidar developed this concept of the martyr in painting by focusing on the symbolic relation between the fallen martyr and his horse. As he explained to the newspaper al-Jumhuriyya in 1965: 'the horse represents the knight, keeping with the popular belief that the horse carries the spirit of the knight after his martyrdom.' That symbolism is present in the mourning processions where al-Husayn is represented by a riderless white horse; but it has its roots in a legend that, when al-Husayn's horse saw his beheaded corpse, it circled around his body, rubbed its head in his blood, let out a ferocious whine and killed forty men. That moment when the martyr is transfigured into the symbol of the horse is in part dramatized in How He Wandered with the Heart of a Martyr. A white horse stands in the foreground carrying on its back a decapitated body. It groans violently into the helmeted warrior on the left who holds a sword triumphantly over his head; arrayed behind the white horse at centre are other horses in crimson and mustard-orange and warriors whose spears and shields resolve into simple shapes and strokes in the distance. The body of the headless corpse astride the white horse is unlike the other bodies in the paintings: it has volume and weight, it casts a shadow, and it gathers together the pinks, grays and browns in the picture. This painting was the sixth in the series; in another painting that comes near the end of the series, in the collection of the Barjeel Art Foundation, Fatigued, Ten Horses Converse with Nothing, the headless corpse morphs into the heads of two horses. The paintings in The Epic of the Martyr were different sizes, and this was one of the largest. Its size reflects Haidar's interest in the mourning processions as a kind of street theatre, his work in stage design, and the monumental scale of ancient Mesopotamian sculpture. But it also reflects, as Dia al-ʿAzzawi has written, Haidar's desire to collapse the distinction between gallery and street, and between art and ritual, by reproducing the atmosphere of the folk celebration inside the museum. To that end, for the exhibition in 1965, Haidar composed a poem in which each line corresponded to a painting in the series, in this way reproducing the coupling of pageant and poetry in the mourning processions. This attempt to go beyond the conventional materials of painting, in order to use the artwork to stage an experience that is not only visual but also emotive, makes The Epic of the Martyr one of the earliest pieces of contemporary art in the Middle East. Saleem Al-Bahloly received a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and has held fellowships at Johns Hopkins and the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is writing a book about an intellectual shift that occurred in Iraq during the 1960s in response to disillusionment with left-wing politics. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com