He didn't come out until the day US soldiers entered Baghdad in April, about one month after they invaded Iraq to topple the dictator Saddam Hussein.

"I felt immense despair. Shells were falling beside me and I was working in a hysterical manner. I felt that artistic creation was a type of defiance because this war ran against the civilization and thinking of Iraqis," Sabti, 50, said at his studio-cafe in Baghdad's upscale Mansur district.

"For me, an artist must continue to create especially in a time of war, to fight the feeling of death that approaches," he said, sitting in a gazebo in front of his villa.

During the war he completed about 100 canvases.

"The day Baghdad fell I put my paintings in a suitcase and I left in a car to join my wife and childen in my home village," about 100 kilometresmiles) from the capital.

"It was a frightening spectacle. Thousands of people were fleeing, smoke covered the town and me, I only thought of one thing: that my paintings were safe," he said.

Now, he has just shown his works in Paris in an exhibit devoted to Iraqi artists.

"The Masks of Text" is a collection of collages using the bindings of old books.

Sabti said the idea came to him to recycle the bindings while leafing through an old Russian scientific book just before combat began in March.

"I rushed to the used booksellers in al-Mutanabbi Street in the centre of Baghdad, who sell old books every Friday and I grabbed all of them I could find: French physics and chemistry books, old scholarly works ...".

They were provisions for the days of combat.

"Because of the embargo, Iraqi artists tried to find new ideas, new materials and you could say that the years of war and embargo led to the emergence of a new contemporary Iraqi School," said Ahmad al-Fadham, a sculptor and professor of fine arts.

Iraq was under comprehensive United Nations sanctions for more than a decade beginning in 1990 after Saddam's invasion of neighbouring Kuwait.

Fadham said the Iraqi School is "one of the most important in the Arab world" and "its precursors like Jawad Salim and Khaled Rahhal were at the forefront of the emergence of modern art in the Arab world."

It is the works of these precursors that Sabti looked for in the streets of Baghdad after the city fell and looters spared neither the museums nor the Saddam Centre of Contemporary Art with its unique collection.

He salvaged about 40 looted works and in June organized the first post-war exhibition at his gallery under the theme: "A hommage to Baghdad."

The exhibition grouped salvaged works of the precursors as well as those of contemporary artists.

"We didn't know that the price of freedom was so high and so painful, that thousands of archeological pieces would be stolen, that the libraries would be burned and hundreds of paintings would be destroyed," the organizers wrote in their catalogue.

"But art and wisdom live within us and will never die."

WAR.WIRE