January 21, 2025
Véronique Vienne : A Remembrance
It is early winter, 2014, and I have just lost my husband to a brief but brutal illness. Friends check in on me, offering support as they are able, but this is a bleak moment, and I’m embarking on what appears to be a pretty lonely trail.
My phone rings, and it is Véronique Vienne, inviting me to Paris to teach for a semester.
“Is there a job opening?” I ask.
“Just come,” she replies. “We’ll invent one.”
And invent one we did. For four glorious months the following autumn, I lived, worked, and taught in Paris because of my friend Véronique Vienne. Véronique—who died last week at 82 after her own brief but brutal illness—will be remembered for many things, but this extraordinary act of kindness touched me so, and touches me, still.
An impassioned writer, devoted educator, and revered colleague and friend, Véronique was a trenchant observer of all kinds of visual culture. She was witty, and she was wise; sophisticated, but unpretentious; elegant, yet approachable. She loved San Francisco but loathed Los Angeles (“the driving, the traffic, the absence of sidewalks!”) even as any distance from her beloved daughter, who lived there, literally tugged at her heart.
Those were her exact words. I love them.
And I loved her. What Véronique understood best, and discussed most, with me, at least, and preferably over a whiskey at her favorite café, Les Éditeurs, was how the French delighted in seizing any opportunity to make things more complicated. “Our favorite activity,” she once explained to me, “is to problematize.” As someone who has been told that I complicate everything, I found great solace in this observation. Also, I grew up in Paris, so this felt like a long-awaited explanation, an affirmation of so much.
Following my mini-sabbatical, I returned to the United States, at once renewed by the experience and saddened by what I had to leave behind. I missed Paris, and I missed Véronique. Like so many long-distance friendships, ours was challenged by dislocation, but never by dissonance; we could always find our way back to the things that mattered: Love. Literature. Philosophy. Art.
Occasionally, we even talked about design.
Véronique loved design and she loved designers. In her family’s home in Languedoc, she would invite friends to come stay, eat, swim—and argue. “Most of my friends are designers, artists, or brainy types,” she wrote to me in the summer of 2022, “and I enjoy our long impromptu conversations about arcane topics such as typography, semiotics, or visual literacy… how I wish you too could come and stay here … with all my graphic designer friends who argue endlessly over typefaces and politics while lingering after lunch.”
Lingering after lunch, indeed. So French! (And such a hospitable environment for all that problematizing.) But these remarks also illuminate how design, for Véronique, was more than a profession or a practice: it was a life spent in communion with others, even when you disagreed with them. Especially when you disagreed with them.
That capacity—to be a critic as well as a cheerleader—demands both an open mind and a generous heart, and Véronique was blessed with a seemingly endless supply of both. “However much I love your writing and intellectual engagement,” she wrote after seeing my paintings for the first time, “for some reason, I am more enthralled at the prospect of seeing your work with portraits.”
And later: “To me, each of your brush strokes is a thought. Maybe I am just projecting my own process on your creative work. When I write, my choice of word is the result of the hours of research and investigation that have gone before.”
And still later: “The beauty of your paintings is an impression that lingers with me.”
There’s that word again—lingering—which I’ve since come to appreciate as a verb, both purposeful and participatory. Véronique understood deeply what many of us do not, which is that this is what it means to slow down and pay close attention to something. Or to someone.
Or perhaps, quite simply, to yourself.
This is, after all, the same person who once wrote:
To be enlightened is to know oneself and not run away.
Could there be a more exquisite reminder of the power of inner resilience, the beauty of grace? In these last few years, managing a Parkinson’s diagnosis that challenged her otherwise prodigious activity, Véronique was working on a historical novel about the invention of paper in the twelfth century. She loved the research, delighting in the challenge of something so rich and complex, inviting her to dig deep, to dream big.
“Intellectual stimulation,” she recently confessed, “is my drug of choice.”
A pragmatist by nature, and a problematizer by choice, her signoff that day was nothing short of poetry.
“Time flies. Friendships endure. Soon, you and I will catch up some more.”
How I regret that we didn’t. How I hope, some day, that we will. And how I will always miss her.
Photo credit: Véronique Vienne on the beach in 2019, via her Instagram
Observed
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Observed
By Jessica Helfand