The Aesthetics of Expressionism and Impressionism in the Poems of Mehdi Akhavan Sales and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab

Impressionism and Expressionism are two important artistic movements in the late 19th century and the early 20th century that could motivate some intellectuals in literature. Significant human issues, great industrial growth, war, exploitation, and thousands of other significant crises were the themes of great and lasting artistic works. Like other crisis-stricken countries of the century, Iran and the Middle East were involved with tensions and reverberations of these crises. Mehdi Akhavan Sales and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab are two representatives of Iranian and Iraqi artists who, keeping in line with other artists, depicted loneliness and isolation of human being in the tumultuous century and they fulfilled the dream of freedom through painting portraits that made up of words and fancy. In this article, considering the aura of the poems, their common grounds with some works of painting in the two artistic movements are discussed. The selected poems are classified according to their themes in terms of the two painting styles. This article seeks out the selection and representation of aestheticism of expressionist and impressionistic images. According to this research, Akhavan Sales and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab are practitioners of both artistic styles, but Sayyab’s images coming from imagination with all the trials and tribulations of his time that are inclined more to Impressionism while those of Akhavan Sales are inclined more to Expressionism. The reason lies in Shakir al-Sayyab’s consideration of his surrounding environment or his concrete attitudes and Akhavan’s inclination for history. Thus, there is a more ambiguous attitude in Akhavan’s poetic images.