Evelyne Axell

Born on 16 August 1935 in Namur, Belgium, Evelyne Axell (née Devaux) was born into a traditional, middle-class Catholic family. Her father, André Devaux, was a well known craftsman in silverware and jewelry in the region and her mother, Mariette Godu, came from a very modest 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 Royal Air Force bomb in 1940, the young Axell was little affected by World War II. After graduating high school, she studied pottery at the Namur School of Art in 1953. In 1954, she switched to drama school and quickly began a career as an actress.[2]

In 1956, she married Belgian film director Jean Antoine, who specialized in art documentaries for Belgian television. 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 Antoine and Axell's son Philippe was born, Axell worked as a television announcer. 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 (A Train Leaves in Every Hour (Il y a un train toutes les heures)). In 1963, she wrote and starred in the provocative film Le Crocodile en peluche, also directed by her husband. Although the film won first prize at the Alexandria International Film Festival, it would be the last film project Axell and Antoine worked on together.[3]

In 1964, Axell quit her promising acting career to pursue painting. She enlisted Surrealist painter René Magritte, a family friend of Antoine's, 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. At the same time, Antoine embarked on a series of documentaries devoted to Pop Art and Nouveau Realisme. Axell went with Antoine to London for filming and met Allen Jones, Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, and Joe Tilson. Inspired by these studio visits, Axell created her own style of Pop art, becoming one of the first Belgian artists to experiment within this avant-garde idiom.[4] Although Belgian collectors were interested in her work, private galleries were resistant to showing her paintings.[5] 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.[6]

In 1969 she won the Young Belgian Painters Prize, no small feat for a female artist at that time. She organized a few illicit happenings as she continued to make increasingly erotic paintings. In 1970 she painted Le Peintre (Autoportrait) [The Painter (Self-Portrait)] said to be the first painting in which a woman painted herself naked and as an artist.[7] Critic Pierre Restany 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 other side is taking the initiative."[8]

In 1972 Axell visited her uncle's family in Guatemala, Jean Devaux, the creator of the Guatemala Ballet, where she became enamored with the landscape and vowed to return. She had secured an exhibition in Mexico for 1973, decided to divorce from her husband and 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 her life and career were unexpectedly cut short in a tragic car crash outside of Ghent, Belgium. Axell died in the early morning of 10 September 1972.[9] Her final piece, L'herbe folle, shows a woman resting comfortably with her sunglasses by her side and surrounded by a tropical forest.[10]

Axell's first paintings were more classically based on oil. Soon after, Axell evolved a groundbreaking signature technique by using transparent and translucent plastic sheets from which she cut silhouettes of her voluptuous females and self-conscious heroines absorbed in (homo)erotic poses and activities. In 1970, she coined the term, "The Age of Plastic."[10] She enamel painted these contoured-cut sheets, often painting on both back and front surfaces, and mounted them on background panels to create layered, low relief images of the figures imbued with an opalescent, dream-like quality. With their upfront sexual imagery, the use of bright colours and manufactured plastic materials, their intense monochromatic surfaces and canvasses shaped like large sign posts and public tableaux, Axell's paintings owned the immediacy and commonality of Pop.[10]

1. Axell, Evelyne, and Angela Stief. "Evelyne Axell." Power up - Female Pop Art: Evelyne Axell, Sister Corita, Christa Dichgans, Rosalyn Drexler, Jann Haworth, Dorothy Iannone, Kiki Kogelnik, Marisol, Niki De Saint Phalle; Kunsthalle Wien, 5. November 2010 Bis 20. Februar 2011, Phoenix Art. Köln: Dumont, 2010. 51.
2. Ken Johnson, "EVELYNE AXELL. 'Axell’s Paradise: Last Works (1971-72) Before She Vanished.’" New York Times, 12 November 2009.
3. John Yau, ""Axell's Paradise: Last works (1971-1972) before she vanished." The Brooklyn Rail, November 2009.
4. Kalliopi Minioudaki, "Pop's Ladies and Bad Girls: Axell, Pauline Boty and Rosalyn Drexler." Oxford Art Journal 30.3 2007, 402–430.
5. Liesbeth Decan, "Evelyne Axell (1935-1972) A Belgian Surrealist Pop Artist?" in Collective Inventions: Surrealism in Belgium eds. Patricia Allmer and Hilde Van Gelder. Leuven University Press (2007), 155–173.
6. Jean Antoine, "Stages in a Life Cut Short. Biography of Evelyne Axell." in EVELYNE AXELL. Du viol d'Ingres au retour de Tarzan iac editions, 2006.
7. Liesbeth Decan, [Review of] Evelyne Axell. From Pop Art to Paradise, Image [&] Narrative, Issue 13, November 2005.
8. Sarah Wilson, "AXELL: One + One" in Evelyne Axell. From Pop Art to Paradise/Le Pop Art jusqu'au Paradis, exh. cat., Namur, Musee Felicien-Rops, Namur, Maison de la Culture de la province de Namur, and Jambes: Galerie Detour (2004), 23–40.
9. Evelyne Axell, 1935-1972 : L'Amazone du Pop Art. Renaissance du livre (2000).

• Official Website
• Evelyne Axell at Broadway1602 Gallery
• Evelyne Axell at IMDb