Yahoo Lifestyle The work of Hélène de Beauvoir: the artist history forgot
A woman stands, concentrating on her work. She’s painting. The bristles are a good couple of feet from her eyes, a painted fingernail holding the long brush nearly by the tip. It’s a black-and-white photograph, but you can tell that the women on the canvas are made up of bright blocks of colour. The artist herself is clearly clad in black, the same colour as her hair; sleeves rolled up, a chic shirt tucked into slacks (unconventional for 1955). There is as much strength in those hands as there is delicacy; the other one, not painting, is stuffed with more brushes. This is Hélène de Beauvoir: artist, feminist, forgotten sister of Simone.
She is 45 in this photograph, and living in Milan – the wife of the diplomat Lionel de Roulet. Her elder sister – whom Hélène looks so like, with that exacting, almost bird-like stare and the neat, straight nose – was firmly on her way to becoming one of the most contentious and well-known feminists of her time; The Second Sex had been published six years earlier, and set the world alight.
You could be forgiven for not knowing who Hélène de Beauvoir was. Perhaps you remember ‘Poupette’ from Simone’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, but don’t know what happened once she grew up. Despite creating more than 3,000 pieces over a lifetime dedicated to art – she stated her ambitions to be an artist in her diary at 15; she was still making work near her death 85 years later – and winning recognition and acclaim during her life both for painting and for her activism, no trace of an English obituary can be found for Hélène de Beauvoir, who died in 2001. Her Wikipedia page is two paragraphs long.
That, though, might be about to change. This month sees the opening of the first ever UK de Beauvoir retrospective. Hélène de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed at the Amar Gallery in London will show paintings and works on paper from the 1950s, when that photograph was taken, to the 1980s. The show offers a mere glimpse through the keyhole of her expansive artistry, but it’s the most we’ve ever seen of de Beauvoir in this country: jewel-like landscapes, teetering on the brink of abstraction; canvases smeared with energy and passion. A snow-covered mountain pass, charmingly spare in watercolours. A self-portrait through a broken mirror, the features becoming more apparent through kaleidoscopic fragments, the longer you look.
De Beauvoir was born in 1910, two years after Simone. When the girls were small they would play a game in which a heroine would triumph over an evil male villain. De Beauvoir always played the man. It taught her two things: that women had to fight for their place in the world, and that Simone suited the spotlight.
They came of age in an apartment on the Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris. From the balcony they could see the Café de la Rotonde and the artists and bohemians who frequented it, among them Modigliani and Picasso. A rich art scene was being fostered just five floors down, promising an escape from the life her mother hoped for them, what de Beauvoir would later describe as “a boring existence: the house, children and nothing else”. Art school followed. First, one mostly attended by girls waiting to get married, which de Beauvoir hated, and then the superior Art et Publicite school, which introduced her to life beyond polite French aristocracy: male life models and bad boys. By the time she was 25, de Beauvoir’s work was noticed by Christian Dior – a curator before his fashion career – and exhibited at the Galerie Jacques Bonjean in 1936, where Picasso took note.
De Beauvoir was insistent on her ambition (“I didn't want to be a young girl of the world, I wanted to become an artist,” she would repeatedly say in later life), and balanced it alongside life as a diplomat’s wife. She was 32 when she married de Roulet, who was then assisting the British and French secret service against the German forces. De Roulet never stopped her painting and de Beauvoir would go on to paint all manner of things, of uprisings and women’s suffering, the havoc humankind wreaks on the planet 50 years before anyone was talking about it. Nor did the couple have children. But they did often move on account of his job: to Morocco and former Yugoslavia, to Italy and, in time, Strasbourg – technically still France, but another world from Paris.
“She hardly lived in Paris after the 1950s,” says Claudine Monteil, the French women’s rights specialist who was a close friend of both sisters. “And if you wanted to succeed as a painter in France, especially if you were a woman, you had to be in Paris. [De Beauvoir] said to me many times that it was very difficult for her, all this being away.”
De Beauvoir exhibited internationally during her career – more broadly in Europe, in America and even Japan. Simone, Monteil tells me, would pick up the cheque for the longer-haul flights. “She was a second mother to Hélène – she was always very protective of her sister, even if she criticised her. She wanted to support her.” But she also knew how she eclipsed things. Monteil once spoke with Simone about Paloma Picasso, how it was difficult to be the daughter of a famous person. “She stared at me, and immediately, spontaneously, said: ‘and to be the sister of a famous person is very difficult.’”
The new London exhibition is named after the work that brought them together: a vanishingly rare copy of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed, published in 1967, 143 copies of which feature 16 etchings by Hélène. Their writing and painting frequently collided over their feminism. The French feminist student uprisings of 1968 inspired 30 paintings. “She combines an interest in contemporary political issues, and an ability to represent them in a relatively unvarnished way, with symbols of timeless womanhood,” explains Naomi Polanski, the assistant curator at Kettle’s Yard. In 1975, Hélène became the president of the first centre of refuge for victims of domestic abuse, often offering them her own hospitality. “She was particularly struck by women who'd been killed within their own home,” Polasnki says. “She was often the victim of everyday sexism, and yet she was part of this avant garde manure that was exciting and alluring.”
Delight, brutality, politics, escape. They swirled together in de Beauvoir’s art as they did her life. One of the few well-worn anecdotes about de Beauvoir is that she claims to have been a feminist before her older sister, so weary was she of men trying to seduce her under the guise of admiring her work (Simone’s response, according to Montreil: “This is ridiculous.”)
But that was de Beauvoir’s character, Montreil says: “Hélène had a greater sense of humour; Simone was on the battlefield for women's rights all the time. Hélène was more relaxed”. Montreil met both of them through her own activism. Four decades their junior, Montreil became a part of their lives, in particular Hélène’s, spending weekends at the house in Strasbourg and involving them in the next generation of feminist activism. Montreil has fond memories of de Beauvoir painting into her final years, classical music on the radio, a cat or two nearby, in the studio of her crumbling country home. “It was very old, nothing had been taken care of. Except it had a wonderful bay window overlooking the garden.” Painting, for Hélène, Montreil says, “was vital. It was the goal of her life. It was how she communicated with the world.”
De Beauvoir wasn’t naive to how she had been shut out of that world, to how she was slipping out of its view. Montreil tells me about one of the last conversations she had with her, days before she died. “She said, ‘Claudine, do you think my paintings will still be seen when I am dead? Do you think they still remember my paintings in Paris?’ She had a sense of inferiority.”
Claudine said she smiled at de Beauvoir, told her that of course they would, of course they did – how could you not? But she was right. De Beauvoir’s works would be seen again. In Paris, somewhere, they are remembered.
But de Beauvoir had one more question, Monteil says. “Do you think people are coming to see my paintings because I am Simone’s sister?” That one is harder to answer. I put it to Polansky: how to divide the two, to uphold de Beauvoir’s work while acknowledging its relevance to Simone? “So many women artists have been defined in relation to either their husband or their father, but sometimes, like in this case, female figures, and it's very difficult to separate those,” she says. “I don't think that we have to separate those because being Simone de Beauvoir's sister informed [Hélène’s] life and work in an extremely profound way.”
There’s also, of course, a chance for Hélène to stand on her own; artists and their work are being re-evaluated all the time. Perhaps this show is just the beginning.
Hélène de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed is at the Amar Gallery until 2 March.
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