Double Axell Double Axell
Opinions

Double Axell

Evelyne Axell at Muzeum Susch
Ewa Borysiewicz
Reading
time 8 minutes

Muzeum Susch in Switzerland is returning Evelyne Axell to her rightful place in the artistic canon, bringing a new nuance to the seemingly well-known history of pop art.

“When I got home I undressed and was struck with my naked beauty as if I had never seen it before. I must have my statue carved. But how?” [1] the artist and aristocrat Marie Bashkirtseff confides to herself. Fragments of her Diaries [2] are quoted by Simone de Beauvoir in one of the chapters of her ground-breaking work The Second Sex (1949). Many years after Bashkirtseff’s diaries were published, Evelyne Axell, whose impressive selection of works is now on display at Muzeum Susch, found her own answer to the question posed by the Russian painter.

Evelyne Devaux was born in 1935 in Namur, Belgium. Her career was a journey from the role of passive muse to an ambassador for sexual liberation and a self-confident artist, convinced of the rightness of her chosen direction and looking for new forms of expression. Evelyne, a graduate of a Brussels drama school, worked as an artist from 1964; earlier she had been an actress and co-creator of documentary films directed for Belgian television by her husband, Jean Antoine. In 1956, she took the surname ‘Axell’ to distract attention from her feminine first name. A while later, she realized that a female painter (and particularly one interested

Information

You’ve reached your free article’s limit this month. You can get unlimited access to all our articles and audio content with our digital subscription. If you have an active subscription, please log in.

Subscribe

Also read:

High Culture in the Magic Mountains High Culture in the Magic Mountains
i
Photo by Claudio von Planta for Muzeum Susch/Art Stations Foundation CH
Dreams and Visions

High Culture in the Magic Mountains

The Art World’s Alpine Love Affair
Stach Szabłowski

Grażyna Kulczyk could have opened her museum just about anywhere. Why did she choose the Swiss Alps?

At the turn of 2019, the Polish art world was, intellectually, far away from home. In an Alpine pass village, Grażyna Kulczyk launched her private Muzeum Susch. What is this institution? Is it a sign of the success of Polish culture, the representative of which has reached the highest Swiss altitudes? Is it an expression of Poland’s biggest art collector’s disillusionment, who, having turned her back on the general public, headed for the mountains, a place where only true art enthusiasts will venture? Should we view Susch as the whim of a billionaire, or rather the fulfilment of a lifelong dream of a connoisseur, who knows not only art, but also the art world? And why did Kulczyk, out of all places, fancy the Alps?

Continue reading