Obituary:
Margo Veillon (1907-2003)
"Painters can be like Fra Angelico and paint heaven. Or they can paint hell. But never talk about how beautiful this art is, how beautiful that. Such talk is rubbish."
A typical Margo Veillon line: she was never less than forthright and in life, as much as in her art, she avoided sentimentality like the plague. Her aim was clarity. Fortunately she possessed the requisite skills, and honesty, to avoid any tawdry claims on the emotions.
Born on 19 February, 1907 in Abbasiya, she was the second child of a Swiss businessman and his Austrian wife. Her father had come to Egypt when he was 16: it was a first stop and subsequently he travelled widely, from Persia to China. It was also a final stop: returning to Egypt he met his future wife on the boat and they subsequently settled in Cairo, living on the profits of the successful export- import business he set up.
The family soon moved from Abbasiya, first to Midan Al-Tewfiqiya, where Margo would spend the first 17 years of her life, and then to the new garden suburb of Maadi where, from the proceeds of the business, her father built a villa. He had only a few years to enjoy the fruits of his prosperity, and died in 1927.
Margo recalled attending several schools in Cairo, at least five different primary schools, and the Lycée Français, from which one might deduce she was, at the very least, a spirited pupil. Eventually she was sent to Switzerland, to school in Zurich, returning in 1924 determined to become a professional artist.
Two years after her father's death, in 1929, she was invited to share a studio by a friend in Paris, where she lived until 1932, drawing and painting continuously and it was in Paris, she always insisted, that she learned to draw, painstakingly, millimetre by millimetre. She was advised by a friend, the Russian sculptor Sania Rabinovitch, to abandon the long lines of her earlier drawings: the advice, clearly intended to promote a meticulous observation, forced Margo to look. It worked and was, as she said much later, a necessary apprenticeship though the resulting technique, embodied in the Dessins analytiques, was abandoned almost as soon as she returned to Cairo.
"It just did not work here," was the explanation offered.
But why did she leave Paris so soon. It was, after all, a city going through one of its most densely creative periods.
"I arrived in Paris an innocent," she told me during an interview for this paper almost a decade ago. "And after three years life became too complicated, too difficult. I was no longer an innocent and I ran away."
That ghost of a regret sounded 10 years ago became, if anything, stronger as she advanced through her nineties. The lessons learned in Paris, though, her exposure first to analytic, and then synthetic cubism, would not be forgotten, emerging most forcefully in the mid to late 60s, in the series of large canvases (and their associated preparatory drawings) depicting the room in a friend's country house in Mahallat Malik in which Margo worked for long periods during that decade.
"Today," she is quoted as saying in Painting Egypt, "all this seems to me to come from much further back, from the years in Paris from 1929 to 1931, years of discovery and of work that even then comprised multiple subjective views of my studio."
She would return repeatedly to these canvases over the intervening years: there are at least 19 large-scale oils. At the centre of each painting, if not quite at the centre of the room, the artist has portrayed herself, often curiously dismembered, dissected as the room has been dissected. The point around which this self-portraiture in situ revolves -- the very heart of the matter -- is the brush, held in the artist's hand. The figure may itself be broken, faceted, splintered, shattered; it may sometimes melt, much like a Bacon portrait might melt, but the brush remains always a straight line, the triumph of geometry and of perspective, of analysis, on the intractably material. The homage to both Braque and Picasso, during modernism's seminal moment, is patently sincere: the result is the most consistent body of modernist painting produced by any artist working in Egypt. Sadly, these works, together with the preparatory drawings, have yet to be exhibited together. Margo did once suggest such an exhibition to the director of one of Cairo's largest public galleries: that he turned it down with the flimsy excuse that he would have preferred new work suggests less a temporary bout of shortsightedness than a case of terminal blindness.
Between 1936 and 1962 Margo made several trips to Nubia, the first in the company of the German painter Martin Seidal. Seidal left Egypt following the outbreak of war in 1939: subsequent trips were made in the company of the painter Suzie Viterbos (in 1947, 1950 and 1955), during which they stayed on a rundown dahabiyya, the photographer Elie Zalka (1956 and 1960 -- the latter trip including in the party Ruth Reichstein, daughter of the 1950 Nobel prize winner in medicine) and, under the auspices of the Ethnographic Survey, with the Swiss photographer Georg Gerster (in 1962). This final visit to Nubia, before it vanished forever beneath the rising waters of the High Dam, culminated in a six-week journey across Sudanese Nubia.
Extracts from the diaries Margo kept on many of these journeys have been published in Nubia: Sketches, Notes and Photographs, and provide a useful précis of the artist's impressions and aims.
"A feeling of anxiety," she wrote in April, 1960, "takes hold of you when you see things of such outstanding beauty. You become conscious of the artist's obsession to externalize and feel the need to put all that you see down on canvas or paper. Occasionally, and this is almost painfully beautiful to witness, the Nile becomes a long, flat mirror; the reflection upon its surface has a completely abstract quality and the light on the water reflecting the sky is extraordinary. One single ripple will carry streaks of an intense cobalt blue and of yellow -- or rather gold, bronze and creamy yellow -- all sparkling with lilac and mauve. From time to time in this seemingly flat landscape there will appear a black mountain enveloped in sand."
As in her painting the attention to colour is carefully nuanced though, in as far as the products of her trips to Nubia are concerned, line would remain dominant, to the extent that the figures that occupy a great many of these sketches become decorative ciphers. The result can occasionally approach costume drama, much in the manner of Leon Bakst.
Throughout a long life Margo Veillon travelled extensively: work survives from Italy, Greece, Guatemala, Spain, Mexico, Sudan, Ethiopia and Switzerland. Throughout the sixties she would spend at least one month a year in London, and sometimes New York. Yet, she would regularly insist, "I have never travelled for the sake of travel." All the time she drew, painted, photographed.
Eventually -- at which point she was well into her nineties -- Margo confided that she no longer felt the need "to capture, capture, capture". Having spent much of the previous century doing precisely that, and mostly in Egypt, the comment was less a reduction of that enterprise than an intimation (she would, typically, allow herself no more than this) that the project was as complete as it would ever be.
Inevitably, things had changed: the wadi in which for five years she painted the same hill, had been stripped bare.
"It was my Mt St Victoire. It was one landscape and it was enough. Now it is desecrated. And for what? To construct ugly seaside houses. The stones were taken. The hill denuded."
On Cairo, the city that was her home for almost a century, she could sound an equally desolate note. "Now it hurts. It hurts the eyes and it hurts the spirit. I still enjoy the crowds but the city, no. It has become too ugly. Always we lose, we lose, we lose. Now I would rather wear dark glasses than to see."
Which latter contention should not be taken too seriously; is, indeed, a rare excursion in rhetoric, an underlining of the attrition time will bring. And Margo was never one to fall for such indulgence.
"Disinterestedness," she once wrote, "signified complete lack of sentimental expression... The impartiality of the adult losing himself in artistic expression is an achievement in that it means he breaks from convention, mannerism, fashion and artistic malady to arrive at the heart of a thing."
It is the constantly deferred arrival at the heart of a thing that defined Margo Veillon's art for seven decades and it is a goal of which she would never lose sight. The demands of the journey can be measured the detachment demanded by an art at once cerebral and painterly. The fastidiousness through which she pursued the goal she had set herself she applied, too, to life.
"This decline of a person is terrible to see," she told me, barely able to walk across the room, so great was the pain. "I wish I had the courage to draw myself trying to walk.'"
Several days later, in a plain brown envelope, arrived a strip cartoon, a copy of 15 small images of a woman, bent with age and with pain, slowly, meticulously, with the aid of two sticks and a great many unpublishable exclamations in the margins, making her way across the page.
With the passing of Margo Veillon Egypt has lost one of its most ardent chroniclers. Few could ever, will ever, match her passionate objectivity.
Margo Veillon, artist, b. Cairo, 19 February, 1907; d. Cairo, 9 June, 2003-06-11
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 12 - 18 June 2003 (Issue No. 642)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/642/cu1.htm