Art: Out of the Desert

Bible illustrations were the talk of Paris last week. The 270 pen & brush drawings on display in the Galerie Beaux-Arts ranged from Genesis to Revelation. More skilled than inspired, they were the work of Edy Legrand, one of France's slickest book illustrators. Obviously determined to achieve an atmosphere of truth to nature and history, Artist Legrand had turned his back on the usual modern mishmash of beards, flowing sheets and halos, had drawn lean, Semitic men & women and placed them in landscapes as stark as the hills of Judea.

Legrand had never been there* but for 15 years he had lived in French Morocco. His house in the city of Rabat (pop. 160,800) had a cellar studio where he worked through the heat of the day. It served as a base for sketching trips made by horse, mule and camel across Morocco's stony plains and into the Atlas Mountains. Swathed in a burnoose, Legrand often camped with Berbers, used them as models for such prophets as Joshua and Jeremiah (see cut). Once in his travels, he says, a Berber witch whose advances he repulsed put a spell on his drawing hand, made it swell to the size of a melon. "A native doctor took the spell away," he says. "Allah be praised!"

Legrand, 56, does not seem the sort of man to drift about the desert on a camel. Dapper and urbane, he sports a neatly clipped little mustache and a lavender-scented breast-pocket handkerchief, confesses an abiding love for good Parisian food and old brandy. But he loves Morocco more and, except for annual business trips to Paris, plans to stay there. "There are two kinds of time," he explains, "European and African. In Europe you count time by the year; in Africa you count it by thousands of years. The land and the people of Morocco are primitive and eternal; that's why I prefer to live and work among them."