Niki de Saint Phalle 1930-2002
By Ruairi Smith
Niki de Saint Phalle, Tarot Garden, 1991. Lithograph. 60×3 x 80 cm, Salon 94, New York.
Peter Schjeldahl’s profile of Niki de Saint Phalle reads as a lovingly crafted ode to the late artist. This scene, for instance: Gloria Steinem walks down Fifty-Seventh Street, spots a cowboy-booted purse-free Saint Phalle, and thinks to herself: “That is the first free woman I have ever seen in real life. I want to be just like her.”
Born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1930, she wrestled with questions of liberation throughout her own life and across the parade of her art: boldly asking why and calling out the inadequacies of the status-quo. As a largely self-taught artist, Saint Phalle’s wide-ranging oeuvre envelops everything from sculpture, to handmade books, to architecture—though she is perhaps best known for Tarot Garden (1979-2002).
Early on, Saint Phalle travelled to Barcelona and became mesmerized by Antoni Gaudí’s staggering mosaics and fanciful buildings. Her encounter with Gaudí planted the seed for the eventual Tarot Garden—a sprawling Tuscan sculpture park of fantastical and figurative environmental art. The fourteen-acres that the garden now spans was initially donated by wealthy friends. Saint Phalle endeavoured, however, to finance the project herself with creations and commodities—perfume, jewelry—of her own making. (She asks: “Why don’t I become my own patron?”) Tenacity and focus run as undercurrents throughout her interdisciplinary career.
Emerging out of a childhood of “privilege and horror,” Saint Phalle focussed her work around celebrations of womanhood and contempt of sexual assault/abuse, climate change, and the AIDS crisis. In the 1960s, she began her Nanas (“dame” or “chick” from the colloquial French), whimsically voluptuous sculptural depictions of women’s bodies that she would return to in differing colour and proportion throughout her career. Also in this period, Saint Phalle explored performative modes of artistry and spectacle: her era of Tirs or “shooting paintings” where she fired projectiles at her work (mostly patriarchal icons sculpted in plaster) to make them ‘bleed.’ Decades later, in AIDS, You Can’t Catch it Holding Hands (1986), Saint Phalle wrote a letter to her son Phillip, in almost child-like looping cursive, in-which she delivered her audience information on limiting the transmission of HIV.
Saint Phalle was an artist obsessed by our inhabitation of space—the physical space of architecture and environment, but also the politics of social space of the public sphere. Nowadays, much of her work exists in public spaces around Europe and the United States for viewers to freely meet, confront (and be confronted by), and delight in the lifeforces she has left behind.
Bibliography
MoMA. “Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life.” Accessed October 21, 2022. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5111
Niki de Saint Phalle. “Life & Work.” Accessed October 21, 2022. http://nikidesaintphalle.org/niki-de-saint-phalle/biography/#1960-1964
Schjeldahl, Peter. “The Pioneering Feminism of Niki de Saint Phalle.” New Yorker, March 29, 2021.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/05/the-pioneering-feminism-of-niki-de-saint-phalle
Sotheby’s. “Niki de Saint Phalle.” Accessed October 21, 2022.