Madiha Umar was the first woman to receive an Iraqi government scholarship to study art in London. There she studied at the Maria Grey Training College, graduating in 1933 with a degree in arts and crafts. In 1937 she became head of the department of painting at the Baghdad teacher training college. After moving to Washington, DC in 1942, she continued to study art at George Washington University. In 1959 she received an MFA from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design.

Between 1942 and 1944, on discovering Nadia Abbott’s work with Arabic script, M. Umar began to research the relationship between Arabic calligraphy and Western art. She was encouraged by art historian Richard Ettinghausen, who presented a solo exhibition of her work at the Georgetown Public Library in Washington, DC. As we can see with Music in Line (1949), the twenty-two works shown were painted in an abstract style, in which the central motif is Arabic lettering rendered in organic forms. The exhibition was accompanied by an essay, “Arabic Calligraphy: An Inspiring Element in Abstract Art”, in which the artist argues that each letter in the Arabic alphabet posseses sufficiently dynamic character to become an abstract design in itself. This text constitutes one of the earliest attempts to theorise the use of Arabic script in abstract works, and testitifies to an interest in the letter as a formal compositional element.

M. Umar’s style is characterised by a desire to emancipate letters from the methodological restrictions of calligraphic art. Doing this, she distances herself from calligraphy, and in her writing expounds upon the plastic possibilities and artistic functions inherent in the abstract aesthetic of lettering. In works such as Untitled (1978), letters never form themselves into words, and often appear detached, floating in the space of the paintings, infusing the compositions with a sense of movement and rhythm.

Upon returning to Iraq in 1966, M. Umar took up a teaching post at the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad. At an exhibition of the One Dimension Group, founded in 1971 by painter Shakir Hassan Al Said (1925-2004), her work was properly recognised: accompanied by its own manifesto, the event marked the official birth of the Hurufiyya (Lettrism) movement. Derived from the word harf, meaning “letter”, the movement concerned itself with the use of letterforms as graphic elements in modern art.

In 1980 M. Umar left Iraq for Amman; she died there in 2005. Her work has attracted attention from private collectors, notably thanks to various exhibitions devoted to Middle Eastern abstraction, including the Grey Art Gallery’s Taking Shape: Abstraction from the Arab World, 1950s-1980s in New York (2022). Her works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, at the National Gallery of Fine Arts in Jordan, at the Mathaf (Qatar), the Ibrahimi Collection (Amman), the Barjeel Foundation (Sharjah) and the Hussein Ali Harba Family Collection (Turin).