15 - 21 November 2001
Issue No.560
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 15 - 21 November 2001 Issue No.560 |
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Obituary: Renate Kao Jordan Lindemann
Last Thursday evening the Cairo Berlin Gallery Downtown was crowded. As at every opening I ever attended at the gallery, tables and chairs had been placed in front of the entrance to accommodate the overspill from the place. There were pictures on the walls, and familiar faces milling around. Only this was no opening. It was a memorial, to the gallery's founder, Renate Kao Jordan Lindemann, who died on 29 October.
The pictures, by a variety of artists, many of whom had exhibited at Cairo Berlin, were of Renate -- there were photographs from the late sixties, thumbnail sketches of Renate behind her desk, and two energetic drawings by Margo Veillon, finished with an unsettling flourish, of Renate with a red beret -- or else they had been bought by her. The walls were not overloaded. But then for as long as I have known Renate, which is most of time she and I have been in Egypt, she had despaired at the tendency to overhang. She would always favour quality over quantity, which was not, necessarily, going to endear her to every potential exhibitor.
Renate Kao Jordan Lindemann was born in Essen, Germany, in 1944. Her father was killed later in the same year on the Russian front, and never saw his daughter. She was brought up in a household of women -- her grandmother, widowed in the first world war, her mother, widowed, as were her two sisters, in the second. She trained as a textile designer, before beginning to work in West Germany's leading gallery. In 1972 she moved to Berlin, where she remained until 1991. And it was in Berlin that she became a founder member of Scheherazade, a women's organisation that protested the war against Iraq.
It was as Germany celebrated reunification, and as the war against Iraq raged, that Renate quietly packed two suitcases and abandoned Berlin for Cairo. She was, as one quickly realised after a first meeting, quite prepared to swim against the flow. She was, perhaps, a little bit addicted to it. Foreigners were supposed to be leaving the Middle East at the time. German's were supposed to be celebrating the rebirth of their nation. Renate, though, saw no cause for celebration. And if foreigners were leaving a place, then surely it was time for her to arrive.
She had limited funds, but managed to secure the lease on a ground floor space on Youssef El- Guindy Street, off Hoda Sharawi, in the heart of downtown Cairo. It was a small space, the smallest, indeed, of the Downtown private galleries. Yet in almost ten years of visiting Cairo Berlin I never felt short changed. Small, yes, and Renate consistently stuck to her guns and refused to over-hang. Half a dozen small paintings, if they were good enough, were enough to make a show. And if they were good enough, then she was content.
Renate, 1997, by Margo Veillon
A new city, a new scene: it takes time to find one's feet. But an eye helps, and Renate certainly had an eye. There was something immensely reassuring simply in knowing that she was there, in Youssef El-Guindy Street, keeping that eye focused, more clearly than most on the pieces she was planning to show. She was doing work that we should all, in our different ways, be doing: promoting those things, those artists, in which she believed, and leaving the rest to others.
It is a difficult business, running a gallery in Cairo, particularly if you have to make a living out of it: the art scene is as full of back-biting, of infighting and intrigues, as any other, perhaps more so. It is all too easy to become bogged down in the depressing factionalism of it all. Yet Renate was fortunate in that among her regular exhibitors she could count on Margo Veillon, with whom she established a close, and fond, working relationship. (It is the fondness that is most apparent in Veillon's portraits of Renate.) And the proceeds from the sales of Veillon's immensely successful exhibitions could be used to subsidise the work of younger, less well-known artists who would otherwise be hard-pressed to find any means of access to the public. It was fortunate, too, that she was temperamentally disinclined to become involved in the quarrels of artists. She was fastidious in maintaining the distance necessary to preserve the objectivity required in dealing with a notoriously egoistic profession, and in that fastidiousness lay much of her considerable charm.
Renate knew her value, and she trusted her taste. The latter one might suppose a basic attribute of every gallerist. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. She refused to be swayed by passing fashions, and resisted faddishness, with the result that Cairo Berlin became one of very few galleries in town to guarantee, and consistently so, a worthwhile viewing experience.
Though loath to court anything that smacked of personal publicity, Renate nonetheless had a well-developed sense of occasion. I once attended an opening at which the then Swiss ambassador to Egypt was given the onerous task of breaking down the door to the gallery with a sledgehammer. And she would have approved of the small memorial in the gallery. The paintings one knows she loved. She would have adored, too, the cascade of blood red roses, Nassir Shama's playing of the oud, the poetry recitations.
The gallery, I am told, will close. That is a great loss to Cairo's art scene. Yet so inimitable was its proprietor, so indomitable her stamp, that it is almost impossible to think of Cairo Berlin continuing without her. No other exhibition space in Cairo bore so clearly the stamp of its owner. It was unmistakable, and irreplaceable.
Renate Kao Jordan Lindemann, b Essen, Germany, 1944; died in Cairo, Egypt. 29 October, 2001.
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