Les Mots - Simone de Beauvoir / Le Deuxième Sexes

Liselotte Watkins effortlessly moves between old masters and postwar pop art in search of inspiration. Ahead of her 2022 solo exhibition La Gita at CFHILL in Stockholm, Pedro Westerdahl (born 1975, Swedish art historian, freelance curator and writer)wrote:

A work like Frassi reveals obvious inspirations taken from Velázquez’s famous masterpiece Las Meninas. […] Art historical references and influences, however, are by no means limited to the works of the old masters. An astute viewer will find numerous playful insertions – references to 20th century masters as well as more general phenomena from contemporary popular culture. A representative and compelling encounter is enacted in the canvas Eva, in which the wall in the background features framed pictures, including one by Picasso and another, seemingly older composition that brings to mind masters from north of the Alps, such as Dürer and Cranach. This approach is reminiscent of that taken by David Hockney in Looking at Pictures on a Screen (1977), in which the model (Henry Geldzahler) poses in front of a screen bearing reproductions of Vermeer, Piero della Francesca, van Gogh, and Degas. As the gaze descends through Watkins’s composition, the eye is caught by a paperback with a blue cut-out by Matisse on its cover. Just behind it, on the same table, we also see a can of Coca-Cola, a distinctly modern temporal marker (as well as a pop culture reference that also associates to the likes of Andy Warhol). Picasso is actually featured on several of these canvases, including Merenda and Matador. The most artful of these references to Picasso is probably the T-shirt in La Famiglia, which is adorned with a reproduction of a famous photo in which Picasso poses in a cowboy outfit.

Watkins’ paintings repeatedly provide direct evidence of the artist’s cultural interests and literary preoccupations.Compositions such as La Critica (2023, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 160 cm) and Motif 10 (2024, acrylic on canvas, 70 x 120 cm), for example, contain direct references to modern literary classics such as J.D. Salinger’s (1919 - 2010) Franny and Zooey (1961), Francoise Sagan’s (1935 - 2004) Bonjour Tristesse (1954) and Henry Miller’s (1891 - 1980) Tropic of Cancer (1934).

For the 2024 exhibition at Teatergrillen (The Theatre Grill, legendary restaurant in Stockholm), Watkins went one step further. Under the collective name Les Mots, Watkins presented eight diptychs focusing on different literary works. These diptychs (executed in 2023 - 2024 with each individual panel measuring ca. 36 x 28 cm) combined painted covers, of famous literary works, with portraits of different individuals (with one exception being Les Mots - Conversations avec Picasso / Gallimard, that instead included a painted studio interior) in works like Les Mots - Other Voices Other Rooms / Capote and Les Mots - Bonjour Tristesse / Sagan. In their presentation of the exhibition Teatergrillen wrote:

Teatergrillen has historically been a place where artists have gathered and talked. The latest artists to exhibit at Teatergrillen are Astrid Sylwan, Hanna Zelleke Collin, Klara Kristalova, Trinidad Carrillo, Jens Fänge, Martin Gustavsson, Olle Borg, Jesper Nyrén, Stefan Otto, Anna Linderstam, Mikael Olsson and Torbjörn Johansson. Teatergrillen is proud to present Liselotte Watkins’ exhibition at Teatergrillen, a long-awaited return. Liselotte Watkins has a history with the walls of Riche and Teatergrillen, the first works she showed at Teatergrillen (in the early 2000s) led to her collaboration with Prada. [...] Watkins’ new exhibition consists of about 12 larger works, full of references to other works and literature. Liselotte also presents a series of smaller works that are books that she has painted on and then had framed.

Although not actually included in the 2024 exhibition, Les Mots - Simone de Beauvoir / Le Deuxième Sexes has apparent, and strong, thematic (literary) links to the eight diptychs at Teatergrillen. The work references the French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist and feminist activist Simone de Beauvoir’s (1908 - 1986) celebrated, and legendary, book Le Deuxième Sexes (The Second Sex) from 1949, in which the author discusses the treatment of women in the present society as well as throughout all of history. Beauvoir researched, and wrote, the book in about 14 months between 1946 and 1949. Some chapters first appeared in the French journal Les Temps modernes (Modern Times), founded by de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980, French existentialist philosopher, writer and political activist; considered a leading figure in 20th-century philosophy, who, despite attempting to refuse it, was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature), with whom she famously lived in an open relationship (challenging cultural and social assumptions which the couple rejected as ‘bourgeois’), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 – 1961, French phenomenological philosopher). The journal (named after the 1936 film by Charlie Chaplin) published its first issue in October 1945.

She published the work in two volumes: Les Faits et les Mythes (Facts and Myths) and L’expérience vécue (Lived Experience). Worth mentioning here is that Watkins’s ‘source material’ for the diptych in the Firestorm Foundation collection is the French publishing house Gallimard’s classic paperback edition of vol. II: L’expérience vécue (Lived Experience). Éditions Gallimard’s best-selling authors include Albert Camus (1913 - 1960), 29 million copies, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900 - 1944), 26.3 million copies. Other celebrated authors published by Gallimard include Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922), Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023), Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (born 1940) and Patrick Modiano (born 1945).

Even though Simone de Beauvoir did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory. One of her best-known, and controversial, books (banned by the Vatican), Le Deuxième Sexes (The Second Sex) is therefore, rightfully, regarded as a groundbreaking work of feminist philosophy, as well as the starting point of inspiration for second-wave feminism.

Copyright Firestorm Foundation