Not a great deal of scholarly attention has been given to the cultural and artistic lives of female artists. In the case of Naziha Salim, her story has been eclipsed by that of her famous older brother,
Jawad Salim. Naziha Salim was born in 1927 in Istanbul to Iraqi parents, who were originally from Mosul. At the time of her birth, her father was an officer in the Ottoman army, stationed in Turkey. The family returned to Baghdad in the 1920s, when Naziha was a small child. She was born into a family of Iraqi artists living in
Turkey. Her father,
Hajji Mohammed Salim (1883-1941) was a painter, while her mother was also an artist and a skilled embroiderer. The artist
Abdul Qadir Al Rassam, the first Iraqi to paint in the European style, was an older relative (possibly her father's cousin). Her older brothers were also talented artists, Rashid (b. 1918) was a political cartoonist;
Su'ad Salim (b. 1918) a painter and designer who would design the coat of arms for the Iraqi Republic; Jawad (b. 1920), a painter and sculptor became Iraq's most beloved sculptor and Nizarre (b. 1925) was also an artist. She was one of the first women to be awarded a scholarship to study art abroad. In the 1940s, she graduated from the
Baghdad Fine Arts Institution and, after gaining the scholarship continued her art education in
Paris. the first group of Iraqi artists to study abroad and who sought to incorporate modern European art techniques within a distinctly Iraqi aesthetic. This group had a major influence on later generations of Iraqi artists. Naziha Salim suffered a stroke in 2003, which left her paralyzed. She lived for another five years, dying in Baghdad at the age of 81. President
Jalal Talabani called her death a "big loss to Iraqi art and culture". ==Work==