Liquid Reflections

A sparkling memoir and portrait of trailblazing artist Liliane Lijn as a young woman.

In 1958, talented and fearless and eighteen years old, Liliane Lijn left her family home and moved to Paris alone to become an artist. Once there, she found an art world filled with the wild energy of creative revolution—peopled and controlled almost entirely by men.

In the years that followed, Lijn built a life for herself in the city. She embraced the hectic bohemian spirit of the Left Bank. She befriended artists, painters, poets, gallerists and revolutionaries, as the late Surrealists gave way to a burgeoning Pop Art movement. She had disastrous love affairs with difficult men. She experimented boldly, creating ground-breaking sculptures with light, text and movement. And as her profile steadily grew, she was told again and again that there are no great women artists—'There never have been.'

Liquid Reflections is her memoir of these years of experiment and adventure—years when Lijn was constantly in motion, from Paris to New York to Venice to Athens, from paper and canvas to wax and Perspex to oil and water. In love, she became pregnant but rebelled against the idea that a woman could not be both a great artist and a mother.

And she sought—and found—radical pleasure in the act of creative expression and in the living, sensuous world around her.

Based on personal diaries from the time, this is a riveting and revelatory account of a singular coming of age—a glittering portrait of the artist as a young woman.

I wrote Liquid Reflections because I wanted to take my readers on the journey I made to become an artist. It's the story of an idealistic, inspired young woman who refuses to accept the prejudices of her time. Becoming an artist was also a search for my own identity... Liliane Lijn