As Baghdad Erupts in Riot of Color, Calls to Tone It Down

Multicolored fluorescent lights cover one of the city’s bridges, creating a Hawaiian luau effect. Blast walls and security checkpoints stick out because they are often painted in hot pink.

Baghdad has weathered invasion, occupation, sectarian warfare and suicide bombers. But now it faces a new scourge: tastelessness.

Iraqi artists and architecture critics who shudder at each new pastel building blame a range of factors for Baghdad’s slide into tackiness: including corruption and government ineptitude, as well as everyday Iraqis who are trying to banish their grim past and are unaccustomed to having the freedom to choose any color they want.

“It’s happening because Iraqis want to get rid of the recent past,” said Caecilia Pieri, the author of “Baghdad Arts Deco: Architectural Brickwork 1920-1950.” “They see the colors as a way of expressing something new, but they don’t know which colors to use. The Arab mentality is that you have to be the owner of your building, and you do what you want with it. But there are no government regulations like in Paris or Rome. It’s anarchy of taste.”

For decades, Saddam Hussein’s government ruled over aesthetics in Iraq’s capital with the same grip it exercised over its people. A committee of artists, architects and designers approved the color of buildings as well as the placement of shrubs. With many beige brick buildings, and color used sparingly — most often on mosques — the city’s appearance was uniform and restrained.

But the committee, like Mr. Hussein’s government, fell apart after the United States invasion in 2003. Some years later, when Iraqis started rebuilding as the violence declined, there was no central arbiter. Bright colors started appearing, and places like the Trade Ministry were done up in pink, orange and yellow.

On one corner, the city might gleam like Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich country many Iraqis hope they can emulate. In other places, the look is still muted and tradition-bound. But the reign of riotous color seems to be steadily expanding.

“It’s something to feel ashamed of,” said Qasim Sabti, one of Iraq’s most famous artists. “It is the ugliest the city has ever been.”

Government officials say they do not have strong enough laws to police the look of Baghdad, as Mr. Hussein once did. The officials also contend that many agency leaders, with money to spend on renovations and architectural face-lifts, are hiring the cheapest, most inept contractors and pocketing kickbacks and unspent funds.

“We don’t have a strong enough deterrent to stop it,” said Najem al-Kinany, the official in the Baghdad mayor’s office in charge of design, who formed a public taste committee a year ago after receiving a flood of complaints about the city’s appearance. “Before 2003, the subject of public taste and choosing what was appropriate was much better than now.”

Mowaffaq al-Taey, who designed many buildings for Mr. Hussein, and Mr. Sabti, the artist, blame the decline in taste on the fact that so many Iraqis appreciated the arts were wealthy enough to flee the country.

“Right now, when I have an exhibition at my gallery nobody comes from the government, only the art students and other artists,” Mr. Sabti said. “Taking care of the look of the city has stopped because the people who have come to power were living in villages with animals. So how did they develop their taste?

“Saddam was also a villager,” he continued, “but he was smart enough to depend on the qualified and professional people who understood art.”

Mr. Taey said Iraqis were emulating the architects and designers of the Persian Gulf region.

“They are trying to show they are part of the sophisticated world, but they don’t know what they are doing,” he said. “They want to prove that they are not just from the countryside.”

The tackiness has also invaded the offices of many government agencies, which have become full of plastic flowers, cheap paintings and multicolored rugs and furniture, he said.

Several agencies buy their art from a market in the Karada neighborhood of Baghdad. Hussein Ali al-Khafaji, the son of a famous Iraqi artist and the owner of a Karada gallery, said that many officials did not even come to the gallery to buy artwork for their offices.

“What they do is send their bodyguards here,” he said. “Some of the bodyguards take photos of the paintings to show their officials so they can choose a painting.”

Mr. Khafaji said he routinely charged $1,000 for paintings worth only $100, because the officials did not understand art. “They don’t know the difference between a good and bad painting,” he said. “They don’t understand anything, so how can they understand art?”

The officials in charge of the public taste committee said they had had some success in persuading government agencies to tone down the colors, but acknowledged that they had a way to go. Until then, Mr. Sabti said, Baghdad will just have to scuff its way through one of the ugliest periods in its history. “There is no worse era than this time,” he said.

For Mr. Taey, the best hope may be a plague of sandstorms.

Then, he said, “all of these colors will be hiding because of good old dust. It will at least reduce the bad taste, and maybe that’s God’s gift to correct our mistakes.”

Tim Arango and Jack Healy contributed reporting.