Considered the ‘founding text of contemporary feminism’, Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe (1949) articulates the female experience and advocates for the subjectivity of women by exercising elements of existentialist philosophy.[i] In 2012, three artists completed a mural depicting Beauvoir in Buenos Aires, Argentina (fig. 1). This piece of public art serves to exemplify Beauvoir’s international acclaim resulting from her extensive and intergenerational influence, and how her image continues to circulate global media.[ii] In the visual reproduction of Beauvoir, the artists demonstrate how an audience receives and interprets the message in the original work by adapting it through a different medium.

As a prominent public intellectual, Beauvoir garnered attention from the press whilst simultaneously commanding many media formats, exemplified in her role as the editor of Les Temps Modernes.[iii] This implies her awareness of the significance of media in the transfer of message from the intellectual to the audience, and thus how her work is intrinsically bound to the medium by which it is presented. As one explores Beauvoir’s enduring legacy through references in literature, theory and art, it is necessary to highlight the reciprocal nature by which medium and message shape and transform each other. 

If images carve a ‘more incisive’ impression than the written word, this mural (fig. 1) arguably resonates with the audience in a way that differs from the text Le Deuxième Sexe, despite both presenting elements of a shared message.[iv] Street art is particularly unique in its ability to communicate a visual meaning which is bound in time and space; it has an inherently ephemeral characteristic.[v] In light of this element of the medium, this piece absorbs the volatile nature of Beauvoir’s existentialist philosophy insofar as her work contests the assumption of a fixed female essence. 

FRAMING EXISTENTIALISM

The introduction to Le Deuxième Sexe frames Beauvoir’s scrutiny of the female situation, whereby women are defined only in relation to men; men are subjects whereas women are obscured as the Other.[vi] Whilst Beauvoir disputes this framework which holds women in fixed positions and limits their freedom, she suggests that women often find comfort in their role as the Other, allowing them to escape the existential anxiety of inalienable freedom.[vii] Beauvoir seems concerned with the  dichotomy of a fixed-fluid nature in humans, particularly in women, and how this limits or liberates individuals.

Existentialist philosophy dictates our ‘essence’ as humans to be a result of our choices, rather than a fixed destiny.[viii] Beauvoir adapts these ideas to the female experience, suggesting that women are condemned to a state of Otherness by forces which impose a fixed essence, or a rigid definition of femininity, upon them.   

THE BIGGER PICTURE

The artwork in Buenos Aries (fig. 2) captures the spirit of Beauvoir’s central principles whilst reshaping and reinforming the message through a new medium. By enlarging the image of Beauvoir as the foreground to the mural, the artists demonstrate the significance of her celebrity in preserving her legacy. The absorption of her image into the public imagination attests to the importance of media in Beauvoir’s work, as it negotiates the relationship between the intellectual and the audience. This bond is further embodied in the depiction of a Cosmopolitan magazine (fig. 3). The artwork ceases to be defined as a tribute to the celebrity and rather ties Beauvoir’s image to her work and to the media through which it is presented. The magazine becomes a vessel for the artists to manifest the dialogue between Beauvoir’s original work and their reproduction of it. 

Cosmopolitan is an American magazine targeted at young women.[ix] The superfluous scattering of words across the cover reflects the arbitrary nature by which feminine ideals are fed to, and hence imposed upon, women. The words on the cover resonate with Beauvoir’s idea of ‘myths’, which Kjellgren describes as the ‘images of womanhood that […] reinforce beliefs in a static female essence supposedly shared by all women’.[x] Upon visiting America, Beauvoir critically observed the behaviours of American women and documented them in L’Amérique au jour le jour (1947).[xi] Beauvoir records that American women hardly dressed for themselves, and rather dressed to emphasise their femininity.[xii] In light of this observation, ‘moda’ (‘fashion’ in English)  displayed on the cover of the Cosmopolitan issue (fig. 3) becomes a means of accentuating female Otherness and thus a static and limiting ‘myth’ for women.

Beauvoir’s lexical choice of ‘myth’ works to contest the belief that these elements are inherent or innate, and rather suggests that they construct false narratives designed to alienate women and deny them liberation from a fixed female essence. The composition of Beauvoir holding the magazine provides a commentary on the role of media in the construction of female Otherness. This mural suggests the medium of print magazine to be a sinister source which publishes constructed myths and is responsible for their widespread distribution. Furthermore, the use of simple nouns implies the repetitive nature of this form of print media as a means of reinforcing expectations of a rigid feminine essence. Whilst Beauvoir’s printed word serves as a revelatory exploration of the liberation of women, this artistic representation of Cosmopolitan exhausts nouns associated with the feminine ideals.

The medium of street art used to reproduce this explorative philosophy informs the original work by recontextualising Beauvoir’s central theory through a different medium. Street art has a ‘transitionary’ nature and constructs ‘a dialogue presupposed to change rather than stability’.[xiii] Therefore, the mural projects Beauvoir’s original, predominately text-based, theory onto a backdrop steeped in volatility. Bound spatially and temporally, and vulnerable to shifting conditions, the mural holds an ephemeral quality; insofar as Beauvoir denies the belief of a preconceived female destiny, the artwork fails to promise eternal consistency. In transcending language barriers, the visual element of the mural democratises the message and lends itself to an unanchored, universal fluidity.

In an exploration of ‘intermediality’, Grishakova observes that a single medium is incapable of capturing ‘the multimodality and complexity of natural perception’, implying the visual affordances of this medium enhance human interaction and interpretation of the message.[xiv] The intermedial composition of the mural enriches Beauvoir’s literary texts with visual layers which deepen the human capacity to comprehend and experience the original work perceptively; the audience is asked to absorb a philosophy that fundamentally rejects stability through a medium defined by its tendency to shift.

DRAWING CONCLUSIONS

Ultimately, the vital relationship that Beauvoir held with a variety of media preserves both her enduring celebrity as a public figure and the legacy of her philosophy. Her work is evidently subject to reinterpretation and certain media, such as street art, capture its revolutionary spirit from the mid-twentieth century and tangibly draw it into the present day. The mural visually realises the ‘concrete answer to an abstract question’ achieved in Le Deuxième Sexe. [xv] The medium grounds the ideas presented in the original text in time and place, whilst the visual and intermedial composition abstracts the message, expanding audiences’ capacity to perceive and understand.

APPENDIX

Fig. 1, 2, 3:

‘Street artists paint mural of Simone de Beauvoir in Buenos Aires’, Buenos Aires Street Art, 12 August 2012 <https://buenosairesstreetart.com/2012/08/street-artists-paint-mural-of-simone-de-beauvoir-in-buenos-aires/> [accessed 25 October 2024]

FURTHER READING

Akin, Canan and N. Sezin Kipçak, ‘Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Reconsidering Benjamin’s Aura in “Art of Banksy”’, Journal of Communication and Computer, 13 (2016), pp.153-158, ​​doi:10.17265/1548-7709/2016.04.001

Awad, Sarah H., and Brady Wagoner, ‘Introducing the Street Art of Resistance’, in Street Art of Resistance, ed. by Sarah H. Awad and Brady Wagoner (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), pp.1-16

Bauer, Nancy, ‘Must We Read Simone de Beauvoir?’, in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. By Emily R. Grosholz, (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.115-135

Beauvoir, Simone de, L’Amérique au jour le jour (Gallimard, 1947)

Beauvoir, Simone de, Le Deuxième Sexe (Gallimard, 1949)

Benjamin, Walter, and Maurice de Gandillac, L’oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproductibilité technique (Allia, 2003)

Bergoffen, Debra and Megan Burke, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2024), ed. by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/beauvoir/> [accessed 24 October 2024]

Flynn, Thomas, ‘Philosophy as a way of life’, in Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction, (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp.16-29 

Garrido Castellano, Carlos, and Otávio Raposo, ‘Public art and social media: street art, tourism, sociocultural agency and cultural production in contemporary Lisbon’, Community Development Journal, 59 (2024), pp.533-552, doi:https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsad018

Grishakova, Marina, ‘Intermediality: Introducing Terminology and Approaches in the Field’, in Jørgen Bruhn et al, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality (Springer, 2024), pp.13-29

Imbert, Claude, ‘Simone de Beauvoir: A Woman Philosopher in the Context of her Generation’, in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. By Emily R. Grosholz (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.3-21

Kjellgren, Adam, ‘The myth of Woman: Simone de Beauvoir and the anthropological discourse on myth’, History of European Ideas, 49.8 (2023), pp.1286-1301, doi:10.1080/01916599.2023.2198542

Landers, James, ‘Creation’, in The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine, (University of Missouri Press, 2010), pp.1-35

Tidd, Ursula, ‘The Death of the Other’, in Simone de Beauvoir (Reaktion Books, 2009), pp.141-160

Trevalyan, Rebecca, ‘The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir on Modern French Visual Art’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 14.4 (2013), pp.61-79

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[i] Nancy Bauer, ‘Must We Read Simone de Beauvoir?’, in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. By Emily R. Grosholz, (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.115-135 (p.115); Simone de Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe (Gallimard, 1949).

[ii] Claude Imbert, ‘Simone de Beauvoir: A Woman Philosopher in the Context of her Generation’, in The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. By Emily R. Grosholz, (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.3-21 (p.3).

[iii] Ursula Tidd, ‘The Death of the Other’, in Simone de Beauvoir, (Reaktion Books, 2009), pp.141-160 (pp.148-149); Debra Bergoffen and Megan Burke, ‘Simone de Beauvoir’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2024), ed. by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2024/entries/beauvoir/> [accessed 24 October 2024]. 

[iv] Rebecca Trevalyan, ‘The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir on Modern French Visual Art’, Journal of International Women’s Studies, 14.4 (2013), pp.61-79 (p.62).

[v] Canan Akin and N. Sezin Kipçak, ‘Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Reconsidering Benjamin’s Aura in “Art of Banksy”’, Journal of Communication and Computer, 13 (2016), pp.153-158 (p.153), ​​doi:10.17265/1548-7709/2016.04.001.

[vi] Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, p.15.

[vii] Ibid, p.21.

[viii] Thomas Flynn, ‘Philosophy as a way of life’, in Existentialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006), pp.16-29 (p.20). 

[ix] James Landers, ‘Creation’, in The Improbable First Century of Cosmopolitan Magazine (University of Missouri Press, 2010), pp.1-35 (p.1). 

[x] Adam Kjellgren, ‘The myth of Woman: Simone de Beauvoir and the anthropological discourse on myth’, History of European Ideas, 49.8 (2023), pp.1286-1301 (p.1286), doi:10.1080/01916599.2023.2198542.

[xi] Simone de Beauvoir, L’Amérique au jour le jour (Gallimard, 1947).

[xii] Ibid, p.54.

[xiii] Sarah H. Awad and Brady Wagoner, ‘Introducing the Street Art of Resistance’, in Street Art of Resistance, ed. by Sarah H. Awad and Brady Wagoner (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017), pp.1-16 (pp.5-8).

[xiv] Marina Grishakova, ‘Intermediality: Introducing Terminology and Approaches in the Field’, in Jørgen Bruhn et al, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality (Springer, 2024), pp.13-29 (p.17).

[xv] Bauer, p.134.