Ahmed ben Driss el Yacoubi

A young Moroccan is cooking for Peggy Guggenheim on a small island off the southern coast of Ceylon, and in the intervals between the meals he draws. The island is Taprobane, the American writer Paul Bowles holds the lease, and the cook is Ahmed ben Driss el Yacoubi, brought east in 1952 as Bowles’s companion and protégé. Guggenheim, a guest that season, buys several of his drawings, so that pages begun as a diversion travel back with the collector to Venice. To understand how a self-taught storyteller from Fez came to leave a mark on the record of Ceylonese modernism, you have to begin far from any gallery, in a childhood steeped in ritual rather than in art.

He was born in Fez in 1928, into a family whose world was mysticism and healing, and he grew up illiterate, a teller of tales rather than a reader of them. He had no formal training of any kind. Bowles met him in Fez in 1947 and became his chief advocate, translating his stories from colloquial Moroccan Arabic and arranging his exhibitions, among them a show at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in 1952. His early drawings were made in black India ink, surreal and dense, human and animal forms folding into one another out of the healing traditions he had absorbed as a boy; later, encouraged to paint by Francis Bacon, who gave him materials, he moved into oils and built his canvases in deep glazes.

The Ceylon chapter was brief. In 1952 Bowles and Yacoubi travelled through India and British Ceylon, exhibiting his work along the way, and it was on Taprobane that Guggenheim bought the drawings she later recorded in her memoirs. He was a passing guest and never a resident, yet his work did not pass with him. It entered the Sapumal Foundation in Colombo, the house Harry Pieris gave over in 1974 to preserve the movement, which holds thirteen artists who exhibited with the ’43 Group alongside its core; among that company, listed as Mohamed bin Dreiss Yacoubi, sits the visitor from Morocco. A foreign guest thereby earned a place inside the record of the island’s first modern art.

His wider standing rested on that same circle of patrons and rooms: shows in New York and London through the 1950s and 1960s, and, it is said, in Tangier, Venice and Rio de Janeiro, the advocacy of Bowles, Guggenheim and Bacon, and biographies now kept by the Museum of Modern Art and by Mathaf in Doha. He died in New York on 25 December 1985.

What remains, in Colombo, is the smaller truth: a guest who cooked and drew on a borrowed island, and whose Ceylon pages outlasted the visit.