​The Watermelon Seller is a painting that is full of symbols and meanings. The colour palette is distinctly Iraqi, it is luminous and composed of pale colours and earth shades. The Cubist treatment of form and the rhythmic repetition of shapes, the sequence of the angular and the linear, reminds of Islamic arabesques consisting of geometric shapes arranged in a kaleidoscopic manner. 

 

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The yellow sun above the top crescent translates a sense of strong heat. The female seller rises her hands up, pointing our attention to the crescent-shaped slice of fruit. The shape is a symbol of the source of life. The crescent in the Middle East calls up the Fertile Crescent, a fertile land, considered a cradle of agricultural societies.1  In ancient Mesopotamian symbolism, the symbol of a square or a house is considered masculine, the circle, crescent and womb refer to the feminine. This is because agricultural cycles correspond to the lunar calendar.2  This concept of fertility is inextricably linked to the notions of motherhood, and, motherland. Here, Selim refers to the source of Iraq’s cultural roots. Thus, he resurrected the ancient form. 

 

The re-discovery of past iconographies is the distinctive feature of Arab Modernism as opposed to European Modernism, which sought to move away from any type of tradition. Perhaps by splitting the seller’s face into two skin tones, the artist is at the same time thinking about the East and West dichotomy of the Modern East. 

 

The seller stares at the viewer through her captivating almond eyes with a typical Mesopotamian look. In the Sumerian iconography crescent shape was associated with the moon god Nanna and the star Inanna and is often found close to the sun disk of god Shamash. The Mesopotamian Kudurru stele of King Melishipak I (1186–1172 BC) is displayed in the centre of the room shows the crescent, the sun and the star guiding his daughter.3

 

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For Selim art must contain the spirit of renewal and innovation, the unique character of Eastern civilisation and the understanding of the foreign styles.4  The crescent as a resurrected artefact appears in Selim’s Good and Evil study for a tile mural commissioned for the Red Crescent headquarter in Baghdad. 

 

Considered as Jewad Selim’s archetypal ‘Baghdad Group of Modern Art’ painting. The abstract interpretation of the struggle of good and evil unfolds against the monochromatic grey background, which incidentally somewhat reminds of Joan Miró’s The Harlequin's Carnival. He, too, was mesmerised by the crescent shape.5 

 

In Selim’s Good and Evil the forces of good, the crescents, are battling with devil-like creatures. The unsettling black creature on the left possesses two crescents as its horns. This duality that is echoed in the seller’s split face into two skin tones, in fact, is a defining aspect of Mesopotamian art and cosmology.6  In the ancient Zoroastrian tradition the universe was a battleground of these two forces. Selim’s composition is a tribute to this rich legacy and a composition that marries the modern and the ancient. This was one way that he was able to united parts of scattered Iraqi identity. This is not only the place of the birth of civilisation but also the ground on which this Modern movement is based. Selim acted in the spirit of what Syrian artist Fateh al-Moudarres believed - since the distinctive Arab identity was almost absent, Arabs ‘must initiate an era of rebirth for all that has become extinct’.7

 

The crescent becomes Selim’s unique feature which is the emblem of his concept

 

                                                     إستيلهم التراث    ​ ​istilham   al-turath, 

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seeking inspiration from culture. Not only does it consider the relationship of the present and past sacred but also describes a philosophical return to tradition in an attempt to discover new contemporary aesthetics.8