L’égocentrique 2

The generosity of Isabelle and Philippe Dewez has enabled us to acquire a work by the Namur Pop artist Evelyne Axell. L’égocentrique 2, which illustrates the feminist dimension of the artist’s work, is exhibited at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. This work is interesting because of its connection to the art of Magritte, but also for its material and technical experimentation in the spirit of the 1960s. The work also presents a liberating and contemporary image of womankind.

A powerful Pop Art work

L’égocentrique 2 is a key work by Evelyne Axell, an artist renowned for her feminist approach to Pop Art. It is a work that is distinguished by its audacity and the powerful message it conveys about a woman who is aware of, and mistress of, her own sexuality. Here, Axell exploits the feminist potential of the pin-up. The pin-up girl, often used in her most pornographic manifestations, enables her to confer an obviously Pop character on the gallery of nudes that she summons, in a call for erotic art that is not only destined to appeal to women, but actually orchestrated by them too.
 

An expression of female subjectivity

L’égocentrique 2 is a reinterpretation of René Magritte’s painting Le Galet (The Pebble) in which he represents his wife, Georgette, in an erotic pose in which she is licking her shoulder as she caresses her breast, for all to see, creating the image of a hedonists pleasuring herself, as if to excite the male onlooker observing her. Axell takes up the theme of male fantasy staged by a man and transforms it into a celebration of female subjectivity. She hijacks Magritte’s Le Galet and rebaptises it L’Egocentrique, appropriating the self-centred masculine theme of the eroticised female model, as it was developed by the Surrealist painter with his wife as model. In L’Egocentrique, Axell placed Georgette at the very heart of the painting, going beyond her role as a simple muse or object, to become the protagonist and total mistress of her own pleasure. Another version of this painting was made, dated 1968, but this is now considered to have been lost.

Magritte’s student

Axell used the Surrealists’ techniques of collage and painting, influenced by the early days of her art. She had turned to painting and decided to follow René Magritte’s advice, after a career in acting and presenting. During her visits to the Magrittes’ home, Axelle must have been impressed by the painting Le Galet, which was a gift from René Magritte to Georgette, his wife and muse, and which had pride of place in their sitting room.

Accessible to the general public

This acquisition is intended to enrich the collection of the Royal Fine Arts Museums in Brussels which already holds a work by Evelyne Axell, thereby further completing the representation of this essential artist in its collections, one of the very few Pop Art painters in Belgium.

The Isabelle and Philippe Dewez Fund

The Isabelle and Philippe Dewez Fund, managed by the King Baudouin Foundation, acquired this work with the aim of preserving it and making it accessible to everyone at the Royal Museums of Fine Art in Brussels. The Fund’s mission is to encourage public accessibility to works of art and to transmit them to future generations by making them available to Belgian museums. The Fund therefore supports financing for the acquisition of works for the Royal Museums of Fine Art in Brussels and for the Ixelles Museum (in Brussels). As Philippe Dewez commented: “Our objective is to help both of these museums to complete their collections.”