Madiha Umar studied art at the Maria Grey Training College in London, graduating with honours in 1933. She studied and taught art in Baghdad, Iraq, during the 1930s. Continuing her training in Washington d.c., Umar received a degree there in art education from George Washington University and a Master’s degree in fine arts from the Corcoran School of Art in 1950. Umar pioneered the modern use of Arabic calligraphy in abstract painting. Her work has received critical acclaim and has been included in many books on the history of art. Her work is held in collections including Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and the Jordan National Gallery of Fine Arts, Amman. Umar died in 2005 in New York Madiha Umar has probably travelled and studied more extensively than most other Iraqi female artists, but without ever allowing her foreign sojourns to dim her vision of the Islamic aesthetics which she had first witnessed in the old mosques and palaces of Damascus and Aleppo, her birthplace. The main theme which captured her imagination was that abstract and decorative element which characterises Arab art: Arabic calligraphy. Whether in Beirut, Istanbul, London or Washington d.c. (where she spent six years at the Corcoran Institute) she went on developing and researching this life-time theme. ‘Every letter of the Arabic alphabet has sufficient potential and dynamic character to produce an abstract image,’ she wrote. Considering that she exhibited the first fruits of her research in Georgetown in 1949, she must remain as the earliest pioneer of this Arab school of art. Doreen Ingrams, The Awakened: Women in Iraq (1983
