Niki de Sainte Phalle was a French-American sculptor, painter, and filmmaker. She was one of the few women artists widely known for monumental sculpture, but also for her commitments. She was best known for her sculptural female figures known as "Nanas". Sainte Phalle was well known in Europe, but her work was little-seen in the United States, until her final years in San Diego.
Background
Niki de Sainte Phalle (born Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle) was born on October 29, 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, France, to an aristocratic Catholic family.
Her father was Count André-Marie Fal de Saint Phalle (1906-1967), a French banker, and her mother was an American, named Jeanne Jacqueline Harper (1908-1980). Marie-Agnès was the second of five children, and one of her cousins was French novelist Thérèse de Saint Phalle.
Within months of her birth, her father lost his wealth during the Great Depression, and her parents moved with her oldest brother to the suburbs of New York City; she was left with her maternal grandparents in Nièvre, near the geographical center of France. Around 1933, she rejoined her parents in Greenwich, Connecticut; her father had found work as manager of the American branch of the Saint Phalle family's bank. In 1937, the family moved to East 88th Street in the affluent Upper East Side neighborhood of New York City. By this time, Marie-Agnès was known as "Niki," the name she would use from then on. Besides, she grew up bilingual in French and English.
Her mother was temperamental and violent, beating the younger children, and forcing them to eat even if they were not hungry. Both of her younger siblings, Elizabeth and Richard de Saint Phalle, would later commit suicide as adults.
Education
In the United States, Saint Phalle attended Brearley School, a girls' school in New York City, from 1942-1944. Though she found Brearley School to be a formative experience, later claiming that it was there she became a feminist, she was expelled for painting the fig leaves covering the genitals of statues on the school's campus red.
She was later enrolled in a convent school in Suffern, New York, but was expelled. She then attended Oldfields School in in Glencoe, Maryland, graduating in 1947.
Nevertheless, as an artist, she was self-taught.
Career
Niki’s first career was as a fashion model. At the age of 18, she appeared on the cover of "Life" (26 September 1949) and, three years later, on the November 1952 cover of "French Vogue". She also appeared in the pages of "Elle" and "Harper's Bazaar".
In 1950, Niki began making her first paintings. In 1952, she moved to Paris. While in Paris on a modelling assignment in 1954, Saint Phalle was introduced to the American-French painter Hugh Weiss, who became both her friend and artistic mentor. He encouraged her to continue painting in her self-taught style.
In September 1954, she moved to Deià, Majorca, Spain, where Saint Phalle read the works of Proust and visited Madrid and Barcelona. In Spain, she discovered the work of Antonio Gaudí and was deeply affected, especially by "Park Güell" in Barcelona, which planted the idea to create her own sculpture garden and inspired her to use diverse materials and found objects as essential elements in her art.
Saint Phalle continued to paint, particularly after she and her family moved to Paris in the mid-1950s. Her first art exhibition was held in 1956 in Switzerland, where she displayed her naïve style of oil painting. The same year, she met Jean Tinguely, who became her artistic collaborator.
In the late 1950s, Saint Phalle became ill with hyperthyroidism and tachycardia, which were eventually treated by an operation in 1958.
In 1959, she was further inspired by the art of Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Rousseau. Niki visited the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, where she also discovered the work of Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Robert Rauschenberg. By this time, she switched from oil painting to gouaches and gloss paint, and began to produce assemblages from household objects and castoffs. In addition, she had decided to dedicate herself fully to creating art, free from the obligations of everyday family life.
After the separation with her first husband Harry in 1960, Saint Phalle set up a studio and continued her artistic experiments. By the end of the year, she and Jean Tinguely moved in together, sharing the same studio and living in an artists’ colony.Tinguely introduced her to Pontus Hultén, then the director of the the Moderna Museet (Modern Museum) in Stockholm, Sweden. Over the next few years, he would invite her to participate in important exhibitions, and acquire her artworks for the museum. She was also included in an important group exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
In the early 1960s, Saint Phalle created a series of works which she called "Tirs" ("Shootings" or "Shots"). It was complex assemblages with concealed paint containers that were shot by pistol, rifle, or cannon fire. The impact of the projectile created spontaneous effects which finish the work. The shooting paintings evolved to include elements of spectacle and performance.
Niki de Saint Phalle had her first solo exhibition in Paris in 1961 and became friends with American artists staying in Paris, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Larry Rivers, and his wife Clarice.
She was also friendly with Marcel Duchamp, who first introduced her and Tinguely to Salvador Dali. The three artists travelled to Spain together for a celebration in his honour and create a life-size exploding bull out of plaster, paper, and fireworks for the end of a traditional bullfight.
In February 1962, Niki and Tinguely visited California and viewed Simon Rodia’s Watts Tower in south Los Angeles. They travelled around California, Nevada, and Mexico, participating in exhibits and happenings.
Saint Phalle and Tinguely moved to an old country inn outside of Paris at the end of 1963. She began creating figurative reliefs - confrontational depictions of women, as well as dragons, monsters, and brides.
Inspired by the pregnancy of Larry Rivers’ wife Clarice in 1965, Saint Phalle created her artistic expressions of the proverbial everywoman and was calling them "Nanas", after a French slang word that is roughly equivalent to "dame" or "chick". The first of these freely-posed forms - made of papier-mâché, yarn, and cloth - were exhibited at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in Paris in September 1965.
In 1966, Saint Phalle collaborated with Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt on a temporary indoor sculpture installation "Hon - en katedral", which means "She-a-Cathedral" in Swedish, filling an ample space in the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, Sweden.
Around this time, Saint Phalle also designed stage sets and costumes for theatrical productions: "Éloge de La Folie" ("Praise of the Madness", 1966), a ballet by Roland Petit; an adaptation of the Aristophanes play "Lysistrata" (1966); and a German-language play she co-wrote with Rainer von Diez titled "ICH (All About Me)" (1968). Large fixed or moveable "Nana" figures were prominent in several of these productions.
In 1967, Saint Phalle began working with polyester resin, a material which could be shaped easily but would transform into a hard, smooth, weather-resistant surface. This new technology enabled her to construct large, fantastical figures for display outdoors in public spaces and parks.
The same year, she exhibited "Le Paradis Fantastique" ("The Fantastic Paradise"), a collaborative grouping of nine of her sculptures with six machines built by Tinguely, on the rooftop terrace of the 8-level French Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal.
Although the French Pavilion itself was popular, most visitors did not see the rooftop terrace where the sculptures were installed. In 1968, the sculptures were redisplayed at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and in New York Central Park. In 1971, some of the artworks were purchased by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, and permanently installed in an outdoor sculpture garden.
In 1968, Saint Phalle first disclosed that she had developed respiratory problems from exposure to dust and fumes in making her artwork.
Starting in 1968, Saint Phalle sold Nana inflatable pool toys, amid criticism from the art world. She ignored the complaints, focusing on raising money for her future monumental projects. In the coming years, she would face more criticism for over-commercializing and popularize her artwork, but she raised significant funding that enabled her to finance several ambitious projects on her own. Over the years, she produced clothing, jewellery, perfume, glass or porcelain figures, furniture, and craft items, many with a Nana theme.
From 1969 to 1971, she worked on her first full-scale architecture project, three small sculptural houses for Rainer von Diez in southern France, which she called "Le Rêve de l'oiseau" ("The Dream of the Bird").
She then joined several other artists under the lead of Tinguely in 1971, starting work on "Le Cyclop", in Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris. Collaborators included Daniel Spoerri, Bernhard Luginbuhl, and Eva Aeppli. Eventually, 15 different people worked on the project, which would not be considered finished until 1994.
In 1972, she installed "Golem", commissioned by the then mayor Teddy Kollek, at a children's playground in the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood of Jerusalem. It was a giant monster with three red tongues protruding from its mouth, which serve as playground slides. The same year, she received a second private architectural commission in Belgium and began a productive association with art fabricator Haligon for her large-scale sculptures and work in editions. Syhe also made her first jewellery design for GEM Montebello Laboratory, Milan. Saint Phalle continued to create "Nanas" for the rest of her life, but soon focused her attention on a comprehensive project in Italy. She decided that she wanted to make a magnificent sculpture garden.
In 1974, Saint Phalle became ill with a pulmonary abscess from her work with polyester and was hospitalized in Arizona. She then recuperated in St. Moritz, Switzerland. She reconnected with Marella Caracciolo Agnelli, a friend from the 1950s in New York, and told Agnelli about her ideas for a fantasy garden. In 1978, Agnelli's brothers Carlo and Nicola Caracciolo offered a parcel of their land in Tuscany for the garden's site.
In 1975, Saint Phalle wrote the screenplay for "Un rêve plus long que la nuit" ("A Dream Longer Than the Night"), and she recruited many of her artist friends to help make it into a film. For the filming, she designed several pieces of furniture, which were later displayed on the facade of the Palais des Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts Palace) in Brussels. From 1968-1988, she also worked on "Last Night I Had a Dream", a sculptural relief painting that included many elements from her earlier life and dreams.
In 1976, she retreated to the Swiss Alps to refine her plans for the sculpture park. One year later, Ricardo Menon became her assistant, working closely with her until 1986.
In 1977, she worked with the English writer Constantin Mulgrave to design sets for "The Travelling Companion", based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, but the project was never completed. The same year, she also visited Mexico and New Mexico, in search of more extensive artistic inspirations.
Niki made first models related to the figures that would be represented in the Tarot Garden, and foundations were laid in 1978. In 1980, construction began on the first architectural sculpture "The High Priestess", representing female creativity and strength. She spent the major part of the next ten years on site, receiving assistance from many friends and supporters.
Also in 1980, she also began selling a series of polyester snake chairs, vases, and lamps. That year, she recorded her first attack of rheumatoid arthritis, a painful disease affecting the joints of the skeleton.
Saint Phalle moved into "The Empress", a building designed in the shape of a sphinx that served as her studio and home, in 1982. That year, she also created a perfume, with a sculptural vial, that bore her name for the Jaqueline Cochran Company. The money from the perfume went to finance the Tarot Garden.
Later, Saint Phalle and Tinguely collaborated on a fountain next to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. She also designed prints for a project to support the Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles in 1983. The same year the Stuart Foundation commissioned a sculpture "Sun God" for the campus of the University of California at San Diego.
From 1984 to 1987, Saint Phalle spent most of her time at the Tarot Garden. She began a series of flower vases in the shape of various animals. From 1987 to 1993, she spent more of her time in Paris, where she developed many of the smaller sculptures for the garden. From time to time, she organized gallery shows of her art, including maquettes of her more significant works, to raise funds for the garden project. Saint Phalle also worked on establishing a permanent legal structure for the preservation and maintenance of the garden.
For health reasons, in 1994, she moved to La Jolla, California, where she lived for next eight years. She established a studio for working with mirrors, glass, and stones, which she was increasingly using in her sculptures instead of paint.
Then Niki de Saint Phalle and Swiss architect Mario Botta began a major sculpture and architecture project, called "Noah’s Ark", in Jerusalem, which was inaugurated in 2000.
Through 2000, she worked on the "Black Heroes" series, an homage to prominent African-Americans, including athletes and musicians such as Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. A year later, she received a commission to redesign and ornament three rooms in the historic 17th century Grotto built in Hannover’s Royal Herrenhausen Garden, originally decorated with shells, crystals, and minerals, which were removed in the 18th century.
Niki de Saint Phalle died of respiratory failure, caused by emphysema, on May 21, 2002 at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California, United States.
Up until the end, she continued to design further developments for her Tarot Garden in Italy, including a maze, for which land was cleared, and metal rods were installed. Upon her death, all new developments in her garden were halted, as she had previously specified.
(This very personal, fully illustrated book tells the stor...)
painting
Green Goddess
I rather like you a lot
Do You Like My Brain?
Be My Frankenstein
Adriana
Untitled
Strength
Dear Philippe, Comment vas-tu?
Dog Vase
L'oiseau Amoureux
Dear Diary
Serpent Chair
Nana
La Force
Garden
Volleyball
18th Montreux jazz festival (Poster)
Arbre de la Liberté
Vive l'amour
Red Sun
The Couple
All over
Shooting Picture
Remember?
Religion
Niki de Saint Phalle grew up in a strict Catholic environment, against which she repeatedly rebelled.
In addition, over the years she had become interested in myths and religious traditions beyond her childhood Roman Catholic upbringing, including Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and ancient Egyptian beliefs.
Politics
Throughout her career, Saint Phalle was outspoken in addressing important political issues of the time. Her "Tirs" series and assemblages reflected the violence of the early 1960s Algerian War for independence from France and asserted her rebellion as part of second-wave feminism. In addition, shortly before her death, she exhibited drawings critical of the George W. Bush administration.
Views
During her career, Saint Phalle was also outspoken in addressing significant cultural issues of the time. Her enormous, curvaceous Nanas celebrated the fecund female form, featuring large breasts and buttocks, splayed limbs, joyous dance postures, and often, black skin.
Besides, in 1983, Niki designed prints for a project to support the Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles. This work, in the form of a pictographic letter, expressed her early awareness and concern for those afflicted by AIDS. She continued to be involved in AIDS prevention and education efforts.
Quotations:
"The Tarot Garden is not just my garden. It is also the garden of all those who helped me make it. I am the Architect of the garden. I imposed my vision because I could not do otherwise. The garden was made with difficulties, wild enthusiasm, obsession, and most of all faith. Nothing could have stopped me. As in all fairy tales, before finding the treasure, I met on my path dragons, sorcerers, magicians, and the Angel of Temperance."
"It's my destiny to make a place where people can come and be happy: a garden of joy."
"Painting calmed the chaos that shook my soul."
"I could do whatever I wanted, whether people liked it or not."
"Most people don't see the edginess in my work. They think it's all fantasy and whimsy."
"AIDS is a complex situation that's sure to bring out the best and the worst in people."
"The world has been experiencing a whole pattern of auto-destruction, whether in environmental disasters like Chernobyl or health disasters like AIDS."
Membership
Saint Phalle joined the Nouveau réalisme ("New Realist") movement, the group of French artists, where she was the only female member.
Personality
Niki De Saint Phalle had a compelling sense of herself as a spiritual being who was the searcher and the seeker of truth. That said, Niki's life was devoted to investigations into the unknown, and finding the answers to the mysteries of life.
She enjoyed a fine mind, and was an analytical thinker, capable of great concentration and theoretical insight. Niki De Saint Phalle enjoyed research, and putting the pieces of an intellectual puzzle together, and once she had enough pieces in place, Niki was capable of highly creative insight and practical solutions to problems.
Niki De Saint Phalle enjoyed her solitude and prefered to work alone. She needed time to contemplate her ideas without the intrusion of other people's thoughts. She was a lone wolf and a person who lived by his own ideas and methods. As a result, close associations were difficult for Niki to form and keep, especially marriage. Phalle needed her space and privacy, which, when violated, could cause her great frustration and irritation.
Quotes from others about the person
A critic: "The French-born, American-raised artist is one of the most significant female and feminist artists of the 20th century, and one of the few to receive recognition in the male-dominated art world during her lifetime."
Connections
Saint Phalle married Harry Mathews in 1949, whom she had first met the age of 11 (he was 12) through her father. Six years later, they met each other by chance on a train to Princeton and soon became a couple. Initially, they had a civil ceremony on 6 June 1949 in New York City Hall. At the urging of Niki's mother, they also had a religious rite at the French Church of New York the following February. Although her parents accepted the union, her husband's family objected to her Catholic background and cut them off financially, causing them to resort to occasional shoplifting. Their first child, Laura, was born in April 1951.
For about a decade, the family would wander around France and Europe, living a bohemian lifestyle. In Nice, Saint Phalle and Mathews would have separate affairs in 1953; after she attacked her husband's mistress, she took an overdose of sleeping pills, but they had little effect because she was manic at the time. When Harry discovered a stash of knives, razors, and scissors under a mattress, he took his wife to a mental clinic in Nice, where she was treated with electroshock therapy and insulin shock.
In September 1954, the small family moved to Deià, Majorca, Spain, where her son Philip was born in May 1955.
In 1960, she and Harry separated by agreement, and her husband moved to another apartment with their two children. At that time, her daughter Laura was nine, and her son Philip was five years old. Besides, Mathews would occasionally buy artworks from his wife as a way of providing her modest support, and she would visit him and the children periodically.
Saint Phalle soon moved in with Jean Tinguely, who by then had separated from his wife, Eva Aeppli. In many ways, the pair were opposites, and sometimes had violent disagreements, and frequent affairs with others. They would live together intermittently and collaborate closely on artistic projects for over a decade before marrying. On 13 July 1971, Saint Phalle and Tinguely legally became married, though the immediate reason may have been tax savings, as Saint Phalle thus became a Swiss citizen. Two years later they separated, but remained on good terms and continued to collaborate on various projects up through Tinguely's death in 1991.