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 in the corporeal) would not be treated seriously by pop artists who preferred macho-centric narratives. So she signed her works using only her nickname, which gave no clue as to her gender.

Evelyne Axell, “Tiger