Hélène de Beauvoir Steps Out of Her Sister’s Shadow

LONDON — A combination of name recognition, talent, and social relevance is earning artist Hélène de Beauvoir a prominence that eluded her during a lifetime spent under the long shadow of her sister Simone de Beauvoir, a philosopher and feminist icon in postwar Paris. Now, nearly a century after her first solo exhibition in 1936, she is finally receiving her first solo show in the United Kingdom. Hélène de Beauvoir: The Woman Destroyed at Amar Gallery in London, on view through March 30, seeks to reintroduce her as an artist in her own right — one whose paintings merged elements of figurative art and abstraction while capturing the social struggles of women in the mid-20th century. 

“I had been researching Hélène for five years and building this exhibition for three years,” gallerist Amar Singh told Hyperallergic. To him, the show is both a celebration and an act of historical correction, revealing little-known aspects of her life, such as the fact that she was a leading women’s rights activist.

Unlike her sister, whose influence was anchored in the power of words, Hélène expressed herself through color and movement. Her paintings, whether depicting urban protests or rural laborers, spoke of the same feminist convictions that defined Simone’s essays.

The exhibition spans her work from the 1940s into the 1970s, charting the evolution of her art from the watercolor-on-paper work “Travailleur du riz” (c. 1940s) depicting what appears to be women working in a rice paddy field, to her later oils, including “Château en Alsace” (Castle in Alsace, c. 1960s). Depicting a castle ensconced in verdant greens and teals with scumbling brushstrokes, the painting is the star attraction of this exhibition. The show also includes works such as “Tigres et damiers” (1972) and a couple of untitled oils in which she flirts with abstraction. 

Hélène de Beauvoir was not always destined for obscurity — in fact, she was the first of the two sisters to gain public recognition. Long before Simone published her first book in 1943, Hélène held her first solo exhibition at Galerie Bonjean in Paris in 1936, when she was just 25. Critics took notice of her talent, noting the influence of great masters while acknowledging the emergence of a distinct voice. Pablo Picasso even paid her a compliment, praising her work as “original.” While Simone’s rise in the intellectual world became unstoppable, however, Hélène remained on the periphery. Though her art was exhibited, particularly in Germany and the United States, she never received the same level of acclaim. 

One of the reasons her legacy may never have achieved the same status as her sister is that she did not remain in Paris, then the center of the art world. Her husband, Lionel de Roulet, worked as a diplomat, requiring the couple to move across Europe and North Africa. Yet these frequent moves seem to have shaped the evolution of her art.

In Venice, her lines became more fluid. In Morocco, color took center stage, filling her canvases with bold contrasts and simplified forms. In Austria, she veered into abstraction, painted swirling mountain landscapes, where skiers appeared as cubist silhouettes vanishing into the snow. 

It was in Italy, where she settled later, that her focus shifted toward women’s labor. Her paintings of “Les Mondines,” the seasonal female workers in rice fields, documented a vanishing way of life while exposing the physical toll of women’s work. Paintings such as “Les femmes souffrent, les hommes jugent” (Women suffer, men judge, 1977), an impressionistic painting depicting a shivering female form before castigating pointed fingers, may also be read as expressions of her feminist stance. 

The events of May 1968, a student revolt that turned into a strike involving millions of workers, would become a defining moment in Hélène’s artistic journey despite her distance from Paris. While Simone was vocal in her support of the protests, Hélène responded with paint.

Over the course of just a few months, she produced Le Joli Mois de Mai (The Lovely Month of May, 80 paintings depicting the uprisings. Working from photographs, radio broadcasts, and her sister’s firsthand accounts, she translated the energy of the streets onto her canvases. This period marked her artistic maturity, a moment when she no longer stood in the shadow of her sister but defined her own legacy. 

Though those works are not on view at the Amar Gallery show, the exhibition will certainly introduce visitors to the trailblazing artist. Nearly a century after she first exhibited her work, visitors to this one may wonder: Would they have paid the same attention to Hélène de Beauvoir if she had a less recognizable surname? Either way, they would not fail to recognize the explosively original talent that Picasso saw in 1936.