Axell 1935-1972 -Het ruisen van het leven-

Axell: Het ruisen van het leven/ Un frisson de la vie
Evelyne Axell en de jaren '60
Taal : Nederlands/ Frans

Monografie van Evelyne Axell met als bijdrage van Hugo Claus het gedicht 'Evelyne' (p. 23).

Evelyne AXELL (1935 – 1972) Born on 16 August 1935 in Namur, Belgium, Evelyne Axell (née Devaux) grew up in a traditional middle-class Catholic family. Her father, André Devaux, was a well-known silverware and jewellery craftsman in the region, and her mother, Mariette Godu, came from a very modest family of watermen. At the age of two, she was declared “the most beautiful baby in the province of Namur”, and her beauty remained a defining characteristic of her adult life. Although the family home and shop in Namur were destroyed by a bomb from the US Air Force in August 1944, just missing the bridge it was aimed at, young Evelyne was little affected by the Second World War, as the family spent most of the war at their summer residence in Wépion. She later moved to a girls’ boarding school in Brussels, where the nuns taught her drawing and painting and encouraged her talent. After leaving school, she studied at the Namur School of Art in 1953. In 1954, she transferred to a drama school in Brussels and quickly began a career as an actress.
In 1956, she was engaged to a wealthy hairdresser from Namur and was about to marry him when, on a train returning from Brussels, she met a young television director, Jean Antoine, who specialised in art documentaries for the fledgling Belgian television. They were married in Brussels in December 1956. She decided to change her name to Evelyne Axell for the sake 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 Belgian avant-garde painters. After the birth of their son Philippe in June 1957, Evelyne Axell worked as a television presenter, mainly depending on her husband’s willingness to find work. Although she became quite famous locally, she found the job trivial. In 1959 she moved to Paris to pursue a more serious acting career. There she appeared in a number of theatre and television plays. She eventually returned to Belgium to star in several films, 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 gave up her promising acting career to take up painting, in order to become less dependent on her husband. She took the surrealist painter René Magritte, a family friend, as her artistic mentor. Axell visited Magritte twice a month for a year, during which time he helped her improve her oil painting technique. Surprisingly, she became the only student of the great Surrealist master. At the same time, her husband began a series of documentaries on Pop Art and Nouveau Réalisme. Evelyne Axell travelled with him to London for the filming and met Allen Jones, Peter Phillips, Pauline Boty, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield and Joe Tilson. Inspired by these studio visits, Evelyne Axell developed her own style of Pop Art, becoming one of the first Belgian artists to experiment with this avant-garde idiom. Although some Belgian collectors were interested in her work, private galleries were reluctant to show her paintings. It was around this time that she began to use the androgynous name ‘Axell’ professionally, in the hope that she would be taken seriously as an artist despite her gender, youth and beauty, not to mention the explicitly sexual nature of her work.
In 1966, her paintings Erotomobiles won an honourable mention in the Young Belgian Painters Prize. In early 1967 she had her first solo exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Shortly afterwards, she stopped using oil on canvas and began to paint on plastic, first on Clartex and then on Plexiglas, using auto-enamel. This new method became her signature technique, which she showed for the first time at an exhibition at the Contour Gallery in Brussels in the autumn of 1967.
In 1969 she won the Young Belgian Painter’s Prize, no mean feat for a female artist at the time. In April 1969, on the opening night of her exhibition at the Galerie Richard Foncke in Ghent, she organised a ‘happening’, in which a woman wearing nothing but an astronaut’s helmet led the crowd through the room and dressed the naked woman. The French critic Pierre Restany was present and commented: “The Belgian painter Evelyne Axell has joined the company of women’s art with Niki de Saint Phalle from France, Yayoi Kusama from Japan, Marisol from Venezuela – and the list goes on. These women live their sexual revolution as real women, with all the immediate, unsurprising consequences: the initiative changes camps”. The subsequent exhibition at the Templon Gallery in Paris was an ironic homage to him. Entitled ‘Axell, Pierre et les Opalines’, it featured a portrait of Pierre Restany surrounded by a series of sensual opalescent nudes – women without names, 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 Guatemalan National Ballet. There she fell in love 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 beautiful house in Guatemala with the help of the Devaux family. But just a few weeks after her return to Belgium, her life and career were unexpectedly cut short in a tragic car accident outside Ghent, Belgium. Evelyne Axell died in the early hours of 10 September 1972 at the age of 37.

76 pagina's. Boek in uitstekende staat. Hardcover gebonden met stofomslag (stofomslag heeft een gaatje vooraan)
ISBN 90 5349 261 5
Snoeck-Ducaju & Zoon 1997

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