Niki de Saint Phalle
(1930 - 2002) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Niki de Saint Phalle |
| Gender: |
Female |
| Place of Birth: |
Neuilly-sur- Seine, France |
| Nationality: |
French |
| Birth: |
1930 |
| Death: |
2002 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Sculptor
Painter
Printmaker |
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Biography
It's 12 February 1961; the place: Paris. Some artists have gathered in a squalid cul-de-sac in Montparnasse, among them lean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri, along with the gallery owner Jeannine de Goldschmidt and the critic Pierre Restany. The thirty-one-year-old Niki de Saint Phalle steps forward and takes aim at a white plaster relief leaning against a gable end. Containers of paint embedded in the plaster burst when hit and streams of red, blue and green paint run down the relief.
This was the first of more than a dozen 'rifle-shot' paintings made by Niki de Saint Phalle, and it marked her breakthrough as an artist. Restany invited her to join a group he had founded, the Nouveaux realistes', whose work made use of everyday objects, scrap and other materials. Their intention was to lend art a new sense of reality and to disassociate themselves from the main artistic current of the day. Abstract Expressionism. Niki de Saint Phalle then came into contact with such artists as Arman, Christo, Jasper Johns, Yves Klein and Robert Rauschenberg.
The 'rifle-shot' paintings were an act of release for the artist because they allowed her to vent her pent-up aggression - particularly towards her father and the male-dominated society in which she lived - in a playful, creative way. The daughter of a French aristocrat and an American mother, Niki de Saint Phalle was raised in France and the United States in an environment marked by strict Catholicism and conservative values. On finishing school, she worked as a model for fashion magazines like Harper's Bazar and Vogue. Aged nineteen, she married the budding author Harry Matthews and soon gave birth to two children. She executed her first oils without having had any professional training, but it was only after suffering a nervous breakdown that she finally decided, in 1953, to become an artist. She left her husband and children in 1960 and moved into a studio with the Swiss sculptor and experimental artist lean Tinguely. They collaborated as artists and eventually married.
In 1963, she embarked on an examination of female role models, such as mother, whore, witch and bride, and created bizarre female sculptures made of wire netting, papier-mache plastic dolls, fabric and plaster. Inspired by the pregnant wife of an artist friend of hers, the painter Larry Rivers, Saint Phalle in 1964 created the first of her 'Nanas', full-figured, light-footed female sculptures painted in bold, imaginative colors that became her trademark. As the women's movement developed, they also became icons of women's new self-confidence. The Nanas' radiate optimism, a zest for life and powerful sensuality, their forms reminiscent both of Pop art and ancient female fertility symbols. Later in her career, the artist's work increasingly alluded to esoteric teachings, such as the Jewish Cabbala. Mexican mythology and Christian concepts of paradise and hell. She viewed her sculptures as archetypes of the sort described by the psychoanalyst C. G. lung: embodiments of the collective unconscious.
With her highly distinctive work, Saint Phalle is one of the twentieth century's most popular women artists. Those who engage with her work are transported from the hi-tech present to a latter-day fairy-tale world. In Jerusalem, her Golem is a children's playground slide; in Paris, her Stravinsky Fountain, a collaboration between her and Tinguely, graces the square in front of the Centre Pompidou. Her tour de force, however, is the Jarot Garden, which has been drawing visitors to the remote southwest corner of Tuscany since 1998. Niki de Saint Phalle died in spring 2002, aged seventy-one.
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In 1998 Niki de Saint Phalle opened her Giardino del Tarocchi (Tarot Garden) in Garavicchio, Tuscany. She had been given land on which to build a sculpture park in the 1970s. Working with her second husband, the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, she constructed twenty-two sculptures out of metal, concrete, ceramic and glass, based upon the major Arcana of the Tarot (there is also a permanent collection of her work at the Niki Museum, Nasu, Japan).
Saint Phalle wrote of the project: 'At last, my lifelong wish to live inside a sculpture was going to be granted: a space entirely made out of undulating curves ... I wanted to invent a new mother, a mother goddess, and be reborn within its form ... I would sleep in one breast. In the other I would put my kitchen' (in a letter published in World of Interiors, December 2000). This was a bold response to a particular problem for women artists - the negotiation of the female body, inhabited by them, but often objectified in art. It was the culmination of a career in which different media - including film, oil-paint, graphic art and writing - were brought to bear on the representation of femininity.
Saint Phalle's best-known works are her exuberant Nana sculptures (the word is Parisian slang, meaning 'chick') such as Black Venus (Miss Black Power) of 1965-7 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York). But she also exposed the dark side of female fantasy and experience. During the early 1960s she made assemblages about monstrous births. A series of bride sculptures have the dusty, desiccated appearance of Miss Haversham, the character in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations (London 1860-1). In Saint Phalle's book Man Secret (Paris 1994), childish handwriting describes sexual abuse and breakdown. Violence was at the heart of Saint Phalle's earliest work. Influenced by Neo-Dada, she extended Marcel Duchamp's work with the readymade to include guns, knives and scissors. Her series of 'tirs' (shooting paintings) are relief compositions, filled with paint and food, which Saint Phalle shot, causing them to spew out their contents. She was invited to join the Parisian Nouveaux Re'alistes group in 1961, but her focus on the social and political position of women set her apart from her male colleagues.
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Samples of Work
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