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.