Hélène de Beauvoir grew up in the Paris of the avant-garde. From an early age, she looked beyond bourgeois expectations—to art, movement and freedom.
The young student of drawing became an internationally exhibited painter. Her path took her across Europe and North Africa; later, she increasingly connected her art with a stand against social injustice and violence against women.
Hélène de Beauvoir was born in Paris on 9 June 1910, two years after her sister Simone. When the First World War began in August 1914, the family was staying in Meyrignac in the Limousin region of western France. Hélène remembered the summers there as a world apart from everyday life in Paris. She later called Meyrignac a “place of freedom”. In 1915, her father Georges de Beauvoir was called up for military service.
Like Simone, Hélène attended the private Cours Desir school in Paris. There she created her first illustration project, the satirical magazine L’écho du Cours Desir. From the family’s apartment on Boulevard Montparnasse, the sisters could see La Rotonde, the artists’ café and meeting place of the avant-garde. Looking across at it became a symbol of a different, self-determined existence.
“Another life.”
The sisters’ shared dream on Boulevard Montparnasse
In 1918, Hélène’s godmother gave her Charles Perrault’s Contes, illustrated by Gustave Doré. She experienced his drawings as a “very important artistic shock”. After the war, the family’s finances declined and in 1919 they moved to a more modest apartment on Rue de Rennes.
Hélène completed her baccalauréat in philosophy in 1927. A year later, she was admitted to the École Art et Publicité on Rue de Fleurus. The school used unusual methods: students learned to draw by observing film sequences. There Hélène discovered her particular fondness for rapid sketching. In 1928, she also met Jean-Paul Sartre.
In 1935, Hélène made her first unaccompanied journey to Italy. The following year, Galerie Bonjean in Paris presented her first solo exhibition. Among the visitors was Pablo Picasso, who held her work in high regard. The young artist had thus found an early place in the Paris art world.
In 1940, she travelled to Lisbon to join Lionel de Roulet, a former student of Sartre’s. Ten days after her arrival, Paris was occupied by the Wehrmacht. Lisbon unexpectedly became a place of exile. Hélène and Lionel married in 1942.
After the war, they left Portugal. Lionel was posted to Vienna as a diplomat in 1945 and to Belgrade in 1947, where he served as cultural attaché. A year later, he joined the French Foreign Ministry. With each move, Hélène’s artistic horizons broadened.
In 1949, the couple began a period in Morocco. There she found an artistic language of her own: pure colours, flat application and an increasingly clear, personal form.
In 1950, Hélène and Lionel settled in Milan. For seven years, they enjoyed the city’s cultural diversity while also acquiring a holiday home in Trebiano near La Spezia. In 1951, Galerie 55 in Paris showed her Moroccan works. This was followed in 1955 by an exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Il Millione and her participation in Peintres d’aujourd’hui, France – Italie in Turin.
Her 1956 exhibition at Galerie Greuze in Paris was titled Cubisme, prismes, cristaux. From 1957, she lived in Paris again for three years. Her now considerably better-known works were shown in Paris, Berlin, Milan, Florence, Mainz and Venice.
In 1960, Hélène took part in the Salon de mai at the Museum of the City of Paris. The museum acquired one of her works and, in the same year, the Paris Gobelins Manufactory commissioned a tapestry from her. At the same time, the couple moved to Strasbourg when Lionel was appointed to the Council of Europe. They later lived in Scharrachbergheim in Alsace.
In 1961, Hélène exhibited at Galerie Hanna Bekker vom Rath in Frankfurt am Main. In 1963, Galerie Synthèse in Paris presented Variations sur Venise. An article about her painting appeared in Les temps modernes, the journal edited by Sartre. Hélène and Lionel bought a house in Goxwiller and settled permanently in Alsace. In December that year, her mother Françoise died—a loss Simone later explored in A Very Easy Death.
In 1967, the sisters realised a long-planned joint project: Simone published La femme rompue—The Woman Destroyed in English—with illustrations by Hélène.
The student revolt of 1968 in Paris and Strasbourg changed Hélène’s work. She now felt a stronger need to make social injustice visible in her paintings. In 1969, she showed her works about May 1968 under the title Le Joli Mois de mai in the winter gardens of the Moulin Rouge in Paris and at Studio Hermès in Rome.
In 1970, she travelled to Japan and met the gallery owner Ludwig Hammer in Regensburg, beginning a fruitful collaboration. Exhibitions followed in Boston, Lahr and Amsterdam in 1971, and in New York, Rome and Amsterdam in 1973. In 1972, Hélène worked in a painting studio with workers from the Peugeot factory in Montbéliard.
A major retrospective at the Palais des Arts et de la Culture in Brest brought together around one hundred works from 1953 to 1975. In 1976, she exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne.
In 1978, Galerie des Futurs in Paris presented her exhibition Regard d’une femme sur le monde des hommes. That same year, she founded SOS Femmes Solidarité – Centre Flora Tristan in Strasbourg. The organisation supported women affected by violence, and Hélène directed it for five years.
For her, art was not merely expression, but also dissent.
Jean-Paul Sartre died on 15 April 1980. In February 1986, Hélène showed works at the French Ministry for Women’s Rights. While she was in the United States for the opening of an exhibition at Stanford University, Simone de Beauvoir died on 14 April.
Hélène’s memoirs appeared in 1987 under the title Souvenirs. The German edition bore the programmatic title Souvenirs – Ich habe immer getan, was ich wollte (“I always did what I wanted”). Lionel de Roulet died in 1990. One year later, Patricia Niedzwiecki published the monograph Beauvoir peintre.
In 1995, the University of Aveiro in Portugal dedicated an exhibition to Hélène. She bequeathed numerous works from her Portuguese period to the university. Hélène de Beauvoir died at her home in Goxwiller on 1 July 2001, aged 91.