I LOVE ART

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE

THE LIFE
Niki de Saint Phalle (French pronunciation: [niki d(ə) sɛ̃ fal]) born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle; was a French-Americansculptor, painter, filmmaker, and author of colorfulhand-illustrated books. She was born on October 29, 1930, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris - one year after Black Tuesday; the French economy was also suffering in the aftermath of the infamous stock market crash that initiated the Great Depression. Her father was Count André-Marie 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. Within months of her birth, her father's finance company closed, 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; In 1937, the family moved to East 88th Street and Park Avenue 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.
Niki grew up in a strict Catholic environment, against which she repeatedly rebelled. 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. The atmosphere at home was tense; the only place where Niki felt comfortable and warm was in the kitchen, overseen by a black cook. Decades later, Niki would reveal that she had suffered years of sexual abuse from her father, starting at the age of 11. She would later refer to the environment where she grew up as enfer ("hell").

FIRST PERSIOD: MARRIAGE, CHILDREN AND ART | 50s:
At the age of 18, Nicki married Harry Mathews. 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. In 1952, the small family moved to Paris. The new parents were casual, even negligent in their care. Saint Phalle rejected the staid, conservative values of her family, which dictated domestic positions for wives and particular strict rules of conduct. However, after marrying young and becoming a mother, she found herself living the same bourgeois lifestyle that she had attempted to escape.
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. When Harry discovered a stash of knives, razors, and scissors under a mattress,took his wife to a mental clinic in Nice, where she was treated with electroshock therapy and insulin shock therapy. In September 1954, the small family moved to Deià, Majorca, Spain, her son Philip was born in May 1955. In 1956, she met the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely and his wife, artist Eva Aeppli. Saint Phalle attempted her first large-scale sculpture, enlisting Tinguely to make an iron armature, which she covered with plaster and paint. In 1959, Saint Phalle first encountered multiple artworks by Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Daniel Spoerri, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Seeing these avant-garde works triggered her first great artistic crisis.She switched from oil painting to gouaches and gloss paint, and began to produce assemblages from household objects and castoffs.By this time, she had decided to dedicate herself fully to creating art, free from the obligations of everyday family life.
In 1960, she and Harry separated by mutual agreement, and her husband moved to another apartment with their two children. 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.She soon moved in with Jean Tinguely.He was becoming well known for his kinetic sculptures made from cast-off mechanisms and junk.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 in 1971.Two years later they separated, but remained on good terms and continued to collaborate on various projects up through Tinguely's death in 1991.

SECOND PHASE: THE ART 50s & 60s
The beginning| 50
Ihren Lebensweg als Künstlerin beginnt Niki de Saint Phalle 1953 nach der Behandlung eines Nervenzusammenbruchs. Sie fasst den Entschluss, die im Jahr zuvor begonnene Schauspielausbildung nicht weiterzuverfolgen, sondern sich als bildende Künstlerin zu etablieren. Bald wendet sie sich von der klassischen Malerei ab und gestaltet zunächst farbige Assemblagen – Kunstwerke, auf deren Bildträgern plastische Objekte nach dem Collageprinzip montiert sind.

Shooting Paintings| 60s
Niki de Saint Phalle began her journey through life as an artist in 1953 after being treated for a nervous breakdown. She decided against continuing to pursue the training as an actor that she had begun the previous year, and instead chose to establish herself as a visual artist. She soon turned away from classical painting and initially designed colorful assemblages – artworks on whose picture carriers plastic objects are mounted in a collage.
Saint Phalle’s Shooting sessions belong to the artistic form of expression of Happenings, events improvised directly with their spectators. In the 1950s, for instance Allan Kaprow in New York or the Japanese avant-garde group Gutai Art Association (Jap. Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai) interacted with their audience for the first time. The aim was to expand the traditional concept of art and to break open the strict division between art genres. In France, the call for a new kind of art was represented by the Nouveaux Réaliste artistic movement around the art critic Pierre Restany. Niki de Saint Phalle joined the group in 1961 as its sole female member.
Niki de Saint Phalle developed the idea of destroying her own works in radical Shooting sessions while participating in “Comparaisons, Peinture – Sculpture” (Engl. Comparisons, Painting – Sculpture), a group exhibition in Paris in February 1961. There, the artist allowed visitors to throw darts at a picture of her husband, whose head she had replaced with a target. Next to her work, the Belgian artist Bram Bogart presented a pure white relief, which gave rise in Saint Phalle to a vision of a bloody picture overflowing with color.
For the so-called “Shooting Paintings”, the artist attached bags of paint, food cans, rope or plastic objects, and containers filled with spaghetti or eggs to a wooden panel and covered them with white plaster. Shots were then fired at the relief. In her “Shooting Painting” from 1961, the arrangement of the objects did not follow any specific narrative. It was first in later works that Saint Phalle designed interconnected scenarios, which then characterized her spectacular Shooting sessions even more clearly as a protest against social constraints and politically motivated violence. Each action not only aimed to destroy the original picture, but also resulted at the same time in the chance creation of a new work.

WOMAN IDENTITY
The artist confronted viewers with the role of women that prevailed in Western societies at the time and reflected their depiction in the mass media. At the same time, she celebrated the female body, its fertility and power, as well as the social achievements that women were realizing in the twentieth century in Europe and the United States.
Niki de Saint Phalle addressed the figures of bride, mother, and child-bearer again and again. As a result of their size and mass, these objects function as large figures of women with voluptuous forms on the one hand. On the other, their bodies, whose surfaces are covered with plastic toys and found objects become a macabre spectacle. These figures are frequently interpreted as an experiment with the “possibilities of being a woman.” They can, however, also be seen as a socio-critical examination of female identity that call into question the traditional picture of women.

The work “Bride on Horse” is presented full of momentum and power. The work here is a life-sized bronze version weighing more than one ton of an older work by the artist. The original version of the sculpture, which was created with the assemblage technique, brings together humble materials like artificial flowers or toy animals and figures. The bronze version was produced by the French art foundry Gilbert Clementi in 1997. In order to be able to finance her various projects herself, Saint Phalle again and again produced new editions of her works, including also sculptures.

NANAS
A new series of works to which Niki de Saint Phalle gave the title “Nanas” was created in 1965. In these female figures with extremely voluptuous forms, trust in the future of a different existence for women in society becomes palpable. The colorfully painted sculptures no longer show the ambiguity of Saint Phalle’s earlier assemblages. They are voluptuous women with full breasts, rounded bellies, large buttocks, and small heads that express vitality and strength.
The term “Nana” calls to mind the English word “nanny” and transcribes the notion of roundness and abundance with its onomatopoeic sound. At the same time, it also makes one think of the French author Émile Zola’s novel of the same name about a prostitute in Paris. Saint Phalle’s first “Nanas” were made of wire, papier-mâché, fabric, and wool. A short time later, Saint Phalle worked on more stable constructions made from strong solvent-based polyester, a material used in the boat building industry. This new material made the figures weather-resistant and robust. Inhaling the poisonous material while producing them, however, gave Saint Phalle a lung abscess that led to several stays in the hospital starting in 1974. Sensual and brimming with strength, the "Black Mosaic Nana" extends her powerful arms and gracefully lifts one leg to dance. From the small head with no face to the spherical breasts and from the broad hips to the feet, everything about this voluminous figure is curvy. The larger-than-life polyester sculpture adorned with mosaic stones of glass and ceramic radiates cheerfulness. With her lively body posture, the "Nana" announces her joy in being a woman and being able to bring something into being.
When referring to her "Nanas", the artist spoke of a “celebration of women,” of figures that are oppressed by neither by men nor by their life. The female figures became Saint Phalle’s new weapon in her mission against men’s wishful thinking about a female body reduced to a sexual object.