14 - 20 March 2002
Issue No.577
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 March 2002 Issue No.577 |
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The first visual trick
Margo Veillon: Egyptian Festivals, ed. Bruno Ronfard, with an essay by John Rodenbeck, Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2002. pp104Margo Veillon celebrated her 95th birthday last month, which makes of AUC's publication of Egyptian Festivals, essentially a collection of the artist's sketches, watercolours and larger oil and mixed-media depictions of mulids, weddings and other festive occasions, a suitably celebratory event. Not that the volume requires the excuse of an anniversary: culled from more than six decades of work the images incorporated represent a unique visual record of "religious dramas that now exist nowhere else on earth and will almost certainly disappear within the next twenty years," as one of the two introductory essays --this by John Rodenbeck-- has it.
The documentary aspect will always, given the passage of time, assume some significance, though here, and despite the inclusion of a number of photographs of the scenes that provide Veillon with her starting point, that aspect continues to retain only minimal importance. That a watercolour and ink drawing of villagers mourning --death, appropriately enough, is included alongside marriage and other such events-- can resolve itself, formally at least, in precisely the same manner as a watercolour given the title Transporting the bride's goods, should alert us to at least one of Veillon's concerns. Both are depictions of processions, both treat the picture plane as an area capable of containing extravagant individual gestures, and both fix those gestures within the framework of a self-contained choreography. There is no impressionistic straining after mood, and certainly no attempt to record the kind of details that would be of interest to the folklorist.
"In a movement or a characteristic, there is always a captured moment that one can develop infinitely: it is a source...The experience of the harvests, of the horses dancing at weddings... all happens in an instant, and the trained eye encompasses all these scenes and the compositions for future paintings. There is a great difference between a finished canvas and scattered sketches but this first visual trick is as valuable as the regular work, day after day, on a canvas." So writes the artist in the foreword to this volume.
Margo Veillon in her studio in the 1950s
At the heart of Egyptian Festivals is a record of "this first visual trick" --a record of observation, immediate, occasionally annotated, with the annotations sometimes, though rarely, indicating future intentions ("derivation from planes/avoid lines/eventually form arabesque at the end just visible on the surface"). For good measure, a few larger works, made from the sketches, are reproduced. Though welcome --and certainly illuminating-- these are hardly necessary, a little bit of icing on a perfectly well-baked cake. So too the few pages of text, by the editor, Bruno Ronfard, and John Rodenbeck, who contributes a short essay.
But this is the painter's show, these the exercises of a trained eye, this the observation, primarily of movement --one of Veillon's signatures.
Charm is a word seldom associated with artists devoted, as Veillon is devoted, to such a stringently formal concerns. Egyptian Festivals, though, is a charming book, and that in its most positive, most transformative sense. In six decades Veillon has never made recourse to the sentimental: what emerges, in this body of work, and as a function of the discipline imposed on the observation of these scenes as much as on the techniques of their depiction, is something distanced, yet perfectly immediate, assuming at times the registers most commonly termed religious.
Reviewed by Nigel Ryan
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