Margo Veillon Reviews

Margo Veillon, one of Egypt’s best known and best loved artists, returns to enchant us again with a collection of paintings and drawings depicting the festivals of Egypt. The cycle of Egyptian life is marked by festivals and celebrations: those for births, weddings, saints’ mulids, national holidays, and closing the circle, funerals. Margo Veillon draws us in to the joy, exuberance, and occasional sorrow that mark the seasons of Egyptian festivals. This remarkable collection of images fills the viewer with the music and dance that punctuate these events and allows us to participate vicariously through the pages in a swirl of colors, smells, sounds, and exultation.

Margo Veillon, one of Egypt’s best known and best loved artists, was born in Cairo in 1907 to a Swiss father and an Austrian mother and died in the same city in 2003. For most of her 96 years she painted and drew Egypt, from north to south, from countryside to city, as well as Paris, London, and other parts of the world. As a witness to a century of enormous change in Egypt as much as elsewhere, she produced a huge, rich, and varied body of work that includes work from across the decades of her career as well as across a variety of media. Although Margo lived part of her life in Europe, it was clearly Egypt that held her imagination through all those long years of artistic innovation. One strand of her work is characterized by an ability to capture and depict the energy of a specific moment in time, be it a toss of wheat in the air to separate the chaff, the stoic bride in a wedding procession, or a horse dancing in a tent at a mulid. The stones, sands, and constantly changing light of the desert were the inspiration for many years for another major line of artistic expression. And a third strand was her exploration of all that can be seen, not seen, and sensed in one place, in her remarkable series of Global Perspectives. These threads and others no less individual and innovative make up the extraordinarily rich tapestry of Margo Veillon’s artistic career over nearly one hundred years.

Born in 1907, Margo Veillon was one of Egypt’s best-loved artists. Presented here is a sampling of her work spanning seventy-five years of her productive career, in a variety of graphic media—pen and ink, watercolor, pencil, and crayon, as represented in a legacy bequeathed to the American University in Cairo. Although she lived part of her life in Europe, it is clearly Egypt that held her imagination and inspired her artistic innovation. Possessed with an ability to capture the energy of a specific moment in time, Margo Veillon drew people and animals, landscapes and street scenes with her characteristic sly humor and gift for depicting a lively vignette or serene visual moment in just a few strokes. These threads and others no less individual and innovative make up the extraordinarily rich tapestry of Margo Veillon’s artistic career, brought together in the AUC Permanent Collection.