“The war in Iraq has been especially disillusioning for young Iraqi artists, many of whom believed the American promises of freedom. As the old order fell, they sat in their cracked-window studios and at paint-splattered easels and dreamed of an Iraqi renaissance.” But the despair which is now gripping the ‘liberated’ Iraq is overwhelming any thoughts of such a rebirth of culture, and the work of an Iraqi artist is now likely to reflect “the mayhem of a suicide bomb, the agony of a mother who has unearthed the dusty bones of her son, the confusion of his country today.”