Paintings by the most prominent Iraqi painters arouse the greed of counterfeiters because of their auction prices
Some Iraqi artworks are sold today for hundreds of thousands of dollars, such as the works of Kazem Haider or Diaa Al-Azzawi.
In the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, "Death to Colonialism" is one of the rare original paintings by Shaker Hassan Al Said, which escaped the chaos when it broke out in Iraq in 2003 with the American invasion, and was an opportunity to promote acts of imitation and illegal trade in looted paintings.
Death to Colonialism, with its dark shades ranging from gray to blue, is considered one of the jewels of Iraqi art. This painting, which was completed in the seventies of the last century, testifies to these thriving decades of Iraqi plastic arts, when Shaker Hassan Al Said was with Jawad Selim and another group of artists working within the Baghdad Group of Modern Art.
Writer Tamara Chalabi, director of the Ruya Foundation for Contemporary Art, explains that "Shaker Hassan Al Said's work is of great importance to modern Iraqi art and even to Middle Eastern art."
In the auction rooms, the paintings of the painter who died in 2004 at the age of 79 sometimes reach $100,000.
His son Mahmoud Shaker Hassan al-Said told AFP that his family, keen to protect his heritage, had included his "complete archives" - about three thousand works in all - and is in the process of issuing a new catalog in cooperation with the Hassanein Brahimi Foundation in Amman. This step is considered "immunity" against attempts at counterfeiting, he said.
The doctor, who lives in the capital, Baghdad, says, "After 2003, chaos occurred in Iraq at all levels, and of course the arts were affected." These circumstances provided an opportunity for "some weak souls to try to imitate the works and benefit financially from them."
"We have stopped many attempts to sell forged works," confirms the fiftieth doctor, who is in constant contact with international auction houses and galleries.
He added, "We recently spotted a fake work in one of the exhibition halls in Baghdad." Mahmoud Shaker Hassan Al Said contacted the gallery via social networks to ask him to remove the painting, but to no avail.
"hundreds of thousands of dollars"
The first victims of trafficking and forgery are the works of the pioneers of modern Iraqi art dating back to the forties of the twentieth century, fifties and sixties, which disappeared with the theft of thousands of pieces from Iraqi museums and institutions in 2003.
In a small art field where everyone knows each other, the best way to avoid scams seems to be to contact the artists' family or friends, or even the artist himself if he is still alive, or academics and experts, to confirm the authenticity of the paintings.
"Modern or contemporary Iraqi art is one of the most important sources of artistic production in the Arab world," says Sultan Saud Al Qasimi, a collector of antiques in the United Arab Emirates.
Iraqi works, in terms of their price, are among the "ten salaries of the highest-priced works in the region," according to what the founder of the Barjeel Art Foundation, a museum in Sharjah that displays more than a thousand works from the Arab world, confirms.
"Some Iraqi artworks are sold today for hundreds of thousands of dollars," he told AFP, citing the works of Kazem Haider or Diaa al-Azzawi. "Imitators notice the auction results, it's an incentive to make forgeries with higher and higher craftsmanship."
The conundrum of authentication and matching appears throughout the region - in Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, for example, and sometimes it is difficult to be 100 percent sure of the authenticity of a painting - but "the problem is particularly acute in Iraq, because of the package of challenges: the migration of artists, the successive wars," says Sultan. Saud Al Qasimi.
The reputation of Iraqi art
Today, the National Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Culture, is looking for stolen works, according to Ali al-Dulaimi, the recently retired director of the foundation.
Al-Dulaimi says, "Before 2003, we had eight thousand jobs, and today there are about two thousand." He adds that after the American invasion, the museum acquired "new works of art and lost works that were returned" to it.
However, many challenges remain. Before 2003, "we did not have a technique in preserving the works, the documentation was only in writing, and therefore we cannot currently claim these works because they are not documented with us."
And in 2017, due to a "dispute over ownership," Christie's announced that it would withdraw from the auction in Dubai a painting painted by Faeq Hassan in 1968. However, the painting was not returned to Iraq. At that time, an Iraqi deputy explained that this painting may have been displayed in a club affiliated with the Ministry of Defense before it was smuggled abroad.
Source : websites