Evelyne Axell was born on August 16, 1935 in Namur, Belgium into a traditional, middle-class Catholic family. Her father, André Devaux, was a well known craftman in silverware and jewelry in the region and her mother, Mariette Godu, came from a very modest family.
After graduating high school, Evelyne studied pottery at the Namur School of Art in 1953. In 1954, she switched to drama school.
Quickly after finishing drama school, Evelyne began a career as an actress. After the marriage to a Belgian film director, she decided to change her name to Evelyne Axell for the purposes of her acting career, which her husband encouraged. Later 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, "Il y a un train toutes les heures" ("There's a Train Every Hour"). In 1963, she wrote and starred in the provocative film "Le Crocodile en peluche", also directed by her husband.
In 1964, Axell quit her promising acting career to pursue painting, taking lessons with family friend René Magritte. 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. Although 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 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.
Besides, 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.
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. The same year she moved 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 Gent, Belgium.
Evelyne Axell died in the early morning of September 10, 1972 at the age of 37.
Evelyne Axell was best known for her psychedelic, erotic paintings of female nudes and self-portraits on plexiglas that blend the hedonistic and Pop impulses of the 1960s. In 1966, her "Erotomobiles" paintings won an honorable mention in the Young Painters Prize.
Moreover, in 1969 she won the Young Belgian Painters Prize, no small feat for a female artist at that time.
Self-Portrait
Le Fruit défendu I
Valentine
Le Joli Mois de Mai
Le Baiser
Ice Cream
Campus
Axell-ération
Paysage (Landscape)
La Cible
Ice Cream (blue version)
Le retour de Tarzan
La femme au serpent
Le Val vert
Le pinceau de la Gorgone
Angela Davis II
Autoportrait sur papier d'argent
Cercle vicieux rouge
Marine
Group Therapy
La Tchèque
L'Herbe Folle
Erotomobile
Auto stop
L’appel
Autoportrait à l’oiseau vert ou Femme à l’oiseau vert
L'Assemblée Libre
La Terre est ronde, variation sur Le Paysage
She was born into a traditional, middle-class Catholic family.
Her painting "The Pretty Month of May 1970" is considered Axell’s most political work. Framed by a self-portrait and a portrait of her friend, critic Pierre Restany, founder of nouveau réalisme, the revolutionary crowd of women in this triptych refers to the protest movements from May 1968.
Physical Characteristics: At the age of two Evelyne was declared "The Province of Namur's most beautiful baby"; her beauty continued to be a defining feature of her adult life.
Quotes from others about the person
Pierre Restany: "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."
In 1956 Evelyne 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. Their son Philippe was born in June 1957. But in 1973, Axell decided to divorce from her husband and moved to Central America.
