I want to create images that are available within reach of all desires and whose glitz stimulates the appetite of the crowds. My dream: to run a factory where sophisticated machines would cut, paint, arrange translucent, fluorescent, radiant materials, according to my orders and my will! A factory at the service of the fantasy of eroticism where works would be created on a chain basis and sold in supermarkets.
Born on 16 August 1935 in Namur, Belgium, Evelyne Axell (née Devaux) was raised in a traditional, middle-class Catholic family. Her father, André Devaux, was a well-known craftsman in silverware and jewellery in the region and her mother, Mariette Godu, came from a very modest waterman family. At the age of two she was declared “The Province of Namur’s most beautiful baby” – her beauty continued to be a defining feature of her adult life.
Although the family home and shop in Namur were destroyed by a US Air Force bomb in August 1944, shortly missing the bridge they were targeting, the young Evelyne was little affected by World War II, as the family spent most of the wartime in its summer residence in Wépion. Later she changed schools, moving on to a boarding school for girls in Brussels, where the nuns taught her drawing and painting, encouraging her talent. After graduating high school she studied at the Namur School of Art in 1953. In 1954, she switched to drama school in Brussels and quickly began a career as an actress.
In 1956 she was engaged with a rich hairdresser of Namur and about to marry him but in a train returning from Brussels she met a young TV director, Jean Antoine, who specialized in art documentaries for the recently-born Belgian television. And in December 1956 they married in Brussels. She decided to change her name to Evelyne Axell for the purposes of her acting career, which her husband encouraged. He cast her as an interviewer in “Jeunes Artistes de Namur” (1957) in which she introduced young avant-garde Belgian painters.
After their son Philippe was born in June 1957, Evelyne Axell worked as a television announcer, mainly depending on her husband’s will to obtain jobs. Although she gained a fair amount of local celebrity, she found the job trivial. In 1959, she moved to Paris to pursue a more serious acting career. There she performed in a variety of theatrical and televised plays.
Eventually she moved back to Belgium to star in several movies, including three directed by her husband (Jardins français, La Nouvelle Eurydice, and Comacina) and one directed by André Cavens and produced by Pierre Levie “Il y a un train toutes les heures”. In 1963 she wrote and starred in the provocative film “Le Crocodile en peluche”, a love story between a white woman and a black man, also directed by her husband.
In 1964, Evelyne Axell quit her promising acting career to pursue painting in order to become less dependent from her husband. She enlisted Surrealist painter René Magritte, a family friend, to be her artistic mentor. Axell visited with Magritte twice a month for a whole year, during which time he helped her improve her oil painting technique. Surprisingly she then became the only pupil of the great Surrealist master.
At the same time, her husband embarked on a series of documentaries devoted to Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme. Evelyne Axell went with him to London for filming and met Allen Jones, Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, and Joe Tilson. Inspired by these studio visits, Evelyne Axell created her own style of Pop art, becoming one of the first Belgian artists to experiment within this avant-garde idiom. Although some Belgian collectors were interested in her work, private galleries were resistant to showing her paintings.
At this time she started to use the androgynous name “Axell” professionally, in the hopes that she would be taken seriously as an artist despite her gender, youth, and beauty, not to mention the explicit sexual nature of her work.
In 1966, her Erotomobiles paintings won an honorable mention in the Young Painters Prize. In early 1967, she had her first solo exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Shortly thereafter, she stopped using oil on canvas and began painting plastic, first clartex and later plexiglas, with auto enamel. This new method became her signature technique, which she showed for the first time at an exhibition at the Galerie Contour in Brussels in the fall of 1967.
In 1969 she won the Young Belgian Painters Prize, no small feat for a female artist at that time. In April 1969 she organized a “happening” on the opening evening of her exhibition at the Richard Foncke Gallery in Ghent, leading a woman wearing nothing but an astronaut helmet through the crowd and redressing the naked woman. The French Critic Pierre Restany was present and commented, “The Belgian painter Evelyne Axell has joined the company of womanpower’s art, with Niki de Saint Phalle from France, Yayoi Kusama from Japan, Marisol from Venezuela – and the list goes on.
“These women are living their sexual revolution as real women, with all the direct, unsurprising consequences: the initiative switches camps.” The subsequent exhibition in the Templon Gallery in Paris became an ironic homage to him. Entitled “Axell, Pierre et les Opalines”, she showed a portrait of Pierre Restany surrounded by a series of sensually opaline nudes — women without a name but each with a nationality.
In 1972 Axell visited her uncle’s family in Guatemala, Jean Devaux, the creator – with his wife Marcelle Bonge – of the Guatemala Ballet. There she became enamoured with the landscape and vowed to return. She had planned an exhibition in Mexico for 1973 and decided to move to Central America for a few years, where she had found a nice house in Guatemala with the help of the Devaux family.
But only a few weeks after her return to Belgium her life and career were unexpectedly cut short in a tragic car accident outside of Gent, Belgium. Evelyne Axell died in the early morning of September 10, 1972 at the age of 37.
Source: http://evelyne-axell.info/eng/
EVELYNE AXELL
‘Axell’s Paradise: Last Works (1971-72) Before She Vanished’
Review by Ken Johnson for The New York Times Nov. 12, 2009.
No longer content to be objects of the lubricious male gaze, a few brave women took the representation of sexuality into their own hands in the 1960s. One was Dorothy Iannone, whose explicit, autobiographical paintings were recently exhibited at the New Museum. The Belgian painter Evelyne Axell (1935-1972) was another, and this small show of erotic, Pop-psychedelic works that she produced in the two years before her death in a car accident makes a compelling case for a more extensive presentation of her brief career.
Beautiful and wealthy, Axell gave up a successful acting career and took up painting in the early 1960s with encouragement from René Magritte, a friend of her husband’s, the documentary filmmaker Jean Antoine. Made in glossy enamel paints on plexiglass and Formica panels, her vividly colorful paintings revolve mainly around images of sexy women.
Her late works convey a kind of pastoral sexual utopianism. In “The Mad Forest,” Axell portrayed herself nude and recumbent in the foreground with a wild blue forest under a yellow sky beyond. It is as if the world were transformed by pure sensual energy. In “The Bird of Paradise,” a hummingbird hovers like a little pantheistic angel near the orange pubic hair of a voluptuous, otherwise all-blue woman.
The proliferation of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases would put an end to the dream of unbridled sexual freedom for all, but Axell’s paintings vividly capture the mood of a time when hedonism and cultural revolution went hand in hand.
Before the Rebellion, Playful Pop Art Novelty
By Ken Johnson for The New York Times Oct. 14, 2010
Why have there been no great female Pop artists? That’s the question posed by Sid Sachs at the start of his catalog essay for “Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968,” a revelatory time capsule of an exhibition that he has organized at the Brooklyn Museum. He is paraphrasing the title of Linda Nochlin’s monument of feminist art history, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
Like Ms. Nochlin’s, Mr. Sach’s question breaks down into several smaller queries: Is it true that no female artists did anything with popular imagery as powerful as the work of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein or James Rosenquist? If so, why didn’t they? If there were some who did, who were they, and why are they not more celebrated? And what does “great artist” mean anyway?
Produced initially by the Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, where it opened in January, the exhibition presents an entertaining hodgepodge of paintings and sculptures by two dozen women. If it does represent the best female artists of the first Pop Art generation and there is no reason to think otherwise you’d have to admit that there were no women producing Pop Art as inventively, ambitiously and memorably as their male counterparts. That is not to say, however, that there were no interesting women mining the Pop vein.
Paintings by Rosalyn Drexler with figures lifted from news photographs, gangster movies and a Chubby Checker poster isolated on flat, gridded, Mondrianesque backgrounds anticipate the cool neo-Pop art of Pictures Generation artists like Robert Longo and Sarah Charlesworth. Idelle Weber’s mural-size painting of silhouetted businessmen riding escalators against an optically buzzing black-and-yellow-checked wall and her small, cast-Lucite cubes with men in silhouette silk-screened on them similarly evoke a shadow world of mechanical representations.
A neon-light sculpture by Chryssa, with variously colored cent signs blinking inside a box of translucent, dark plexiglass, is a nice marriage of Minimalism and commercial signage. Barbro Ostlihn’s Georgia O’Keeffe-like centered painting of a simplified, many-petaled, orange sunflower has a psychedelic vibe, while Dorothy Grebenak’s translation of liquor-bottle labels and other sorts of commercial logos into hooked rugs give Pop a sensuously tactile, folk-art spin. Kay Kurt’s 10-foot-wide painting of a box of white chocolates is a spectacular piece of Photorealism.
A quibbler might point out that some artists in the exhibition are not, strictly speaking, Pop Artists. A Vija Celmin sculpture of a greatly enlarged, stubby pencil, for example, is closer to Magrittean magic realism than Pop. Yayoi Kusama’s pieces of furniture bristling with white, stuffed phallic forms are more in a tradition of Surrealist assemblage, and May Wilson’s glittery, collaged portraits of masked women resemble works of an eccentric Victorian hobbyist. They have an idiosyncratic strangeness far from the cool modernity of Pop. Including such artists, however, does help capture the general spirit of playful novelty that inspired all kinds of artists in the early ’60s.
A self-consciously feminist art movement came after the decade covered by this show, but a few of these women asserted protest against sexism in no uncertain terms. Martha Rosler’s collages of Vietnam War imagery, domestic interiors and Playboy pinups are exceptional for their ideological ferocity. May Stevens’s “Big Daddy Paper Doll,” which was made in 1970 and was added to the show by the Brooklyn Museum, belongs to a later moment. It personifies the patriarchy in the cartoon character of a uniformed, thick-necked authority figure. But most of the exhibition’s artists were more ambivalent about the feminine mystique.
Marjorie Strider’s painted relief of a beautiful woman holding a basketball-size radish in her teeth is like a work by the lubricious Tom Wesselmann. Her 12-foot-wide triptych picturing a sexy woman in a bikini in three different poses, breasts projecting in three dimensions, seems simultaneously to embrace the sexual freedoms precipitated by the Pill and to mock the commercial exploitation of desire. A bulbous statue of a cartoon giantess by Niki de Saint Phalle, meanwhile, incarnates a zany, retrogressive Great Mother of countercultural revolution.
Few women of this era, evidently, were ready to challenge male domination in life or in art openly. Mr. Sachs’s anecdote-rich essay vividly describes a bohemian art world not unlike the bourgeois milieu of “Mad Men,” in which female artists were expected to play the roles of wife, lover, helpmeet and caretaker first and that of professional art maker last if at all.
Some women contributed significantly to their partners’ work with little or no acknowledgment. Ms. Ostlihn produced some of the paintings of her husband, Oyvind Fahlstrom, and Richard Hamilton created his seminal collage “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?” using images that his wife, Terry Hamilton, and the artist Magda Cordell spent several days clipping from magazines.
Patty Mucha sewed the fabric shells for the early soft sculptures of her husband, Claes Oldenburg. Her essay chronicling her collaboration with Mr. Oldenburg is one of the delights of the catalog. Though notably rancor free, she admits that after they divorced in 1970 she stopped making her own clothes, as she was “suffering from intense burnout.”‘
Then there was what Mr. Sachs called “the beauty trap”: Women who were young and pretty could hang out with the boys, but few of them would be taken seriously as artists. Mr. Sachs quotes Carolee Schneemann, who said, “You had to shut up and affiliate yourself with interesting men,” and “you had to be good looking.” This is borne out in the catalog by pictures of artists like de Saint Phalle, Marisol, Evelyne Axell and Pauline Boty, who happened to be blessed with extraordinarily photogenic looks. It is easy to imagine why such naturally and socially privileged people would hesitate to break out of their gilded cages.
In light of all this, the exhibition’s title, “Seductive Subversion,” takes on a shady double meaning. Ostensibly it describes works that smuggle social critique under appealing aesthetic cover. But it also implies an old idea about what members of the so-called weaker sex must do to get what they want: use their charms and wiles to put men off their guard. In most parts of the world, open rebellion is still not an option for women.
That things are better today for female artists working in Europe and the United States is undeniable, though how much better remains debatable. While the highest prices are still reserved for male heavyweights, there were more women than men represented in the last Whitney Biennial. We might suppose, therefore, that some female artists living and working now will one day go down in history as “great.” But what would that mean?
It would be hyperbolic to claim that any of the artists in “Seductive Subversion” are great in the sense that Michelangelo and Picasso were. Nor will any of them be found to have eclipsed the kings of Pop. But then again, is the idea of greatness even relevant anymore? Are any artists of the Postmodern era, male or female, truly great?
Absent consensus about standards for measuring excellence in art, it becomes an empty term of endearment and a marketing label. (Andy Warhol thought everything was great.) Maybe the Bravo reality television show “Work of Art” has it all wrong.
Maybe there will never be another great artist. And maybe that will be O.K.
Evelyne Axell and The Sixties
Text by Pierre Restany (1930 – 2003)
Evelyne Axell was brutally torn from life on the 10th of September 1972. Her creative period coincided with the sixties, a period now seen as one of the most innovative in the second half of the 20th century.
The work of Axell, although highly singular, bears the strong imprint of this period, and its liberation of lifestyles, bodies, mindsets and taboos of all kinds.
The strictly pictorial works of Axell were produced over the seven years from 1965 to 1972. The seven previous years, from 1955 to 1962, had been devoted to her career as an actress. There were thus two transitional years between the two symmetrically successive phases of her vocation. These were also years of initiation: film director Jean Antoine, who made a film with her, introduced her to Magritte. The first became her husband, and the second her pictorial mentor. From Jean Antoine, she had a son, Philippe, from Magritte, she had an initiation that brought her to become one of the major player in the European artistic scene of the 1960’s.
When Axell began to assert her painting talents, young people all over the globe were living in a world of Pop. Her seven years of painting took place against the background of the great period of cultural globalisation of the sixties and its culminating events. The urban metropolitan lifestyle of a district of New York had become a planetary existential model: Pop Art was at the centre of a socio-cultural constellation alongside pop songs, pop music, hamburgers, jeans and popcorn. The leaders of the new European realism were consolidating the second wave of their affirmation. Niki de Saint-Phalle was celebrating triumphant feminism with her generously curved women, César was switching from compressions of cars to polyurethane expansions. Warhol was making infinite reproductions of screen-printed portraits of stars.
Axell-ération
From the beginning, Axell painted in fiat tint, and cut out stylised shapes in the fabric which she then superimposed on backgrounds reflecting the influence of Op Art. As though in a premonition of the future, the car is a recurrent theme.
Erotomobile
And then the effervescence of the second half of the sixties proclaims the rebirth of otherness and the right to be different: others in terms of ail their protesting minorities. May ‘68 was a symptom pointing the way forward to a change in society, to the transition from the industrial world to the post-industrial world.
It is in this dynamic whirlwind that the work of Axell developed, and its expansive force was never relaxed for a moment.
As though reflecting her wholehearted adherence to the dynamic movement of her time, she quite naturally abandoned oil painting to explore the range of plastic resins, and particularly Clartex – a material produced for the space of only one year – and which she used for works including “La grande sortie dans l’espace”, Plexiglas, and methyl polymetacrylate, which she readily used in its opaline colour form. Ail these synthetic plastics were being experimentally developed or improved during this period; on several occasions, she had to stop using a material because it had been discontinued.
Axell was able to play with the translucidity and transparency possibilities of plastic resins by colouring them with enamel. The medium of the painted image thus contributed to its modernity, and over the seven years of Axell’s production it is possible to retrace the parallel development of plastic technology during the same period. The opaline Plexiglas which she finally chose was a well-adapted solution for the problems of her expressive language.
It was through the body of the woman, and primarily her own, that Axell conveyed to us the breath of life which animated the whole of her pictorial career. As early as 1966, the originality of her style was clearly asserted. Without hesitation or repentance, the artist imposes her definition of the image froni the outset, in the midst of the expansive phase of the consumer society. She is determined to show us that a woman’s body is not a consumer good.
Her determined stance of erotic extroversion is asserted throughout her work. Whether she is an odalisk, a Persian, a Czech or a little pink feline, Axell’s woman asserts – in the subtle immanence of her presence – her right to bear witness to the organic perenniality of desire. The Axell woman, beautiful and sensual, launches herself into a Matissean round dance.
Sensitive to the events of 1968, Axell made a triptych portraying a group of naked young people, dominated in the background by the silhouette of a young woman brandishing the red flag. Two other major expressions of her ideological commitment date from 1970: “L ‘Assemblée libre” in which her old friend Dypréau is shown in the centre, and “La Participation”. The same political mutation of mass desire is to be found: raw eroticism liberates energy to challenge the existing order, and becomes the driving force of communication with other people.
And then she was to be the painter of the idyllic woman, blooming in the midst of luxuriant and rather exotic nature – she loved both Mexico and Guatemala – waiting for the Tarzan who was to take her to seventh heaven, a kind of oasis or terrestrial paradise. The animals there are colourful – blue for the elephant. orange for the monkey, multi-coloured for the birds of paradise.
In seven years of painting, Axell experienced the global modernity of her period with exceptional intensity, and entered into a carnal bonding with its changing dynamic. Evelyne Axell lived her art like a destiny, violently dramatic, demanding, absolute. Through it she has left us the breath of life, a life which she rode bareback like an Amazon.