Catalogue extract (UK): Niki de Saint Phalle

Content

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Preface Christian Gether

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Niki de Saint Phalle – Feminist and Femme Fatale Naja Rasmussen

31 Creativity in the Feminine Mode

Camille Morineau

51 The Giant Woman in Stockholm

Camilla Jalving

85 Niki de Saint Phalle – a Biography

Victoria Christiansen

92 List of Works

L’Arbre (The Tree), 1970 From Nana Power. Niki Charitable Art Foundation (55)

Niki de Saint Phalle – Feminist and Femme Fatale

The visitors shuddered as the salvo of shots tore into the torso of the sculpture. The next bullet went right through the face. The paint ran down the virginal plaster body with the rustling white cloth curving around the hips.

Black, red, orange and yellow occupied the white surface as if it was a canvas. BANG. BANG. BANG. At once beautiful and shocking. Not only the front rows were in the danger zone. In fact the whole audience in the hall was within shooting distance when the Venus de Milo (1962) was shot at (page 9). The symbol of ideal female beauty par excellence was riddled with bullets – executed as entertainment in a fiercely feminist, art-critical showdown.

The assassin was Niki de Saint Phalle – dressed for the occasion in her signature white shooting costume with a smart jacket over it. Terrifying and très chic!

audience and ultimately with the shooting-up and creation of the sculpture Venus de Milo. As a grand finale a cannon was to have sprayed the sculpture white again, but the cannon backfired and almost ended up among the audience.2 Whether the 15 minutes were top-class entertainment or sheer insanity is hard to say – but surely the show was a judicious mixture of both? It was undoubtedly unique avant-garde art.

The evening show at the Maidman Playhouse in New York on 4 May 1962 was extraordinary in every way. The performance lasted just 15 minutes, and at a hectic tempo offered among other things a tooth-brushing dance troupe, pouring rain on the stage, a feather duster that shot ping-pong balls, the construction of a cardboard-box wall that screened off the view of the stage, and a number of other bizarre scenes performed by some of the most experimental artists in New York.1 Viewed with the eyes of today it was an all-star team including – besides Niki de Saint Phalle – Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, Öyvind Fahlström and Saint Phalle’s partner, the Swiss thing-finder and ‘macho artist’ Jean Tinguely. The last of these performed as a cardboard-architect and burlesque ballerina (page 8). The show culminated with Saint Phalle’s marching entrée down through the central aisle among the

Shooting star and feminine feminist In 1960 Niki de Saint Phalle plunged body and soul into her life’s mission: with all her being she wanted to be an artist. Her messages were to be written in neon so everyone could understand them, and she wanted to win recognition as a woman artist in a male-dominated (art) world. And she succeeded. In time the French/ American power woman was inscribed in the western art canon as one of the most radical and visionary artists of the twentieth century. When she exploded on the scene she was just 30 years old, a mother of two, separated and bursting with creativity and artistic energy. She developed an original artistic idiom and she went her own way. Saint Phalle’s experimental practice, extraordinary power and passionate gender struggle speak directly to our own time. Her art combines strong views on gender roles and equality with universally valid themes like love, vulnerability, joie de vivre and personal emancipation. She achieved great international success, but at first it was not in the cards that this Catholic-educated girl with her aristocratic forebears would become an anti-authoritarian feminist, femme fatale and later an acclaimed artist on an equal footing with her male colleagues.

By Naja Rasmussen

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DADDY film still by Peter Whitehead with colour retouching, 1972

In the Paris of the 1960s Saint Phalle’s violent, masculine way of working and her love of dressing up were

tremendously confusing and sensational: how could a feminine, divinely beautiful woman use scrap and loaded weapons to produce feminist messages? As we shall see in the following, ambivalence became her hallmark and her strength, and she was making her mark with aesthetic new departures and gender-political points several years before women’s lib really gained a foothold: performance art had not been invented, and the women’s movement, Mouvement de libération des femmes, was not established in earnest in France until 1970. Saint Phalle paved the way – as an artist and as a woman. But who was she?

The Construction of Boston, Maidman Playhouse, 4 May 1962 Photo: Hans Namuth

Venus de Milo, 1962. Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie GP & N Vallois, Paris (18)

The following is an introduction to Niki de Saint Phalle’s artistic activities and life story. The aim is not to explain the works through her biography, but simply to present the life story that is omnipresent in her oeuvre. I will therefore show, with a point of departure in both the works and the biography, how her self-narration, her femininity and her artistic method function as elements in a conscious feminist strategy.

Niki de what? – Posh bird, rebel, model, drama queen and artist Cathrine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle was born near Paris to aristocratic Catholic parents. Her parents lived in New York, but she herself stayed in France with her grandparents until she was three. In New York the family lived an upper-class life on the Upper East Side with servants, a cook and a nanny. Little Niki went to a Catholic convent school, but she was rebellious, kicked up too much trouble and on the whole had a turbulent early education with several changes of school. Back home she was no fan of the classic gender-role patterns based on home-making mothers and hard-working fathers. In one of her many autobiographical retrospects she emphasizes her views on the matter: “As a child I could not identify with my mother and my grandmother, my aunts or my mother’s friends. They all seemed a pretty unhappy lot. Our home was confining.

A narrow space with little liberty or privacy. I didn’t want to become like them, guardians of the hearth, I wanted the world and the world belonged to MEN. A woman could be queen bee in the home but that was it. The roles men and women were allotted were subjected to very strict rules on either side. When my father left the apartment after breakfast 8:30 every morning he was free (so I thought). He had the right to two lives, one outside, the other inside the home. I wanted the outside world to be mine also. Very early I got the message that MEN HAD THE POWER AND I WANTED IT.”3

In her late teenage years Saint Phalle took drama courses. At 17 she was discovered by a model agent, and she began her career as a photo model for among other media Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar and LIFE magazine. With a Francophile American mother and a noble French father with a yen for everything American, Saint Phalle was brought up strictly in accordance with the old-fashioned virtues; studies and small jobs were fine, but most importantly of all Saint Phalle was to make sure she got married to a well-off man.

“My brother John was encouraged to develop his brain.

[To me] this was denied. I felt jealous and resentful that the only power allotted to me was the power of attract-

Niki de Saint Phalle on the cover of Vogue, 1952. Photo: Robert Doisneau

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ing men. It didn’t really matter whether I studied or not as long as I passed my exams. My mother’s desire was that I should marry a rich and socially acceptable man.”4 By the age of 18 Saint Phalle was in fact married to the music- and art-loving budding author Harry Mathews.

Two years later she gave birth to their daughter Laura, and the family ran off to Paris, where they lived a freethinking Bohemian life among artists and writers. But Saint Phalle was not comfortable with this and she was admitted to hospital with severe depression. During her stay there she began to paint, and the artistic work functioned as her therapy: “Painting put my soul stirring chaos at ease and provided an organic structure to my life which I was ultimately in control of. It was a way of taming those dragons that have appeared throughout my life’s work and it helped me feel that I was in charge of my destiny.”5 In 1955 they had a son, Phillip, but Saint Phalle had a hard time combining art with family life and suffered several mental breakdowns. Art became her way out of the mental suffering. Through art she drove out the destructive thoughts, monsters, dragons and demons that possessed her mind. The monsters turned out later, in her autobiographical work Mon Secret, mainly to represent her own father: in the book she reveals that her father abused her sexually when she was 11 years old.6 The book was published in 1994, 27 years after her father’s death. By then Saint Phalle had long been using art to work with her trauma.

In 1960 Saint Phalle realized, after a difficult time with depression, suicidal thoughts and admission to a psychiatric ward, that she could not live a life locked into the role of housewife, and she left husband and children to devote herself to her artistic vocation: “I was an angry young woman, but then there are many angry young men and women who still don’t become artists. I became an artist because I had no choice, so I didn’t need to make a decision. It was my fate. At other times in history, I would have been locked up for good in an asylum – but as it was I was only under strict psychiatric

supervision for a short while, with ten electroshocks etc. I embraced art as my deliverance and a necessity.”7 The rupture was as liberating as it was painful. This emotional paradox haunted Saint Phalle for the rest of her life and was a source of much of her creative drive and artistic raw material. The works often shuttle between the aggressive and the affectionate, the strong and the vulnerable, the demonic and the cloying. Saint Phalle also had to struggle with the betrayal and grief she brought upon herself and her family, and the monster was thus associated not only with her father but also with herself and her choices.8 The documentary with the illustrative title Who is the Monster? You or Me? (1995), focuses closely, with Saint Phalle as the narrator, on the existential ambivalence between personal liberation and the zest for life on the one hand, and taboo and betrayal on the other. Saint Phalle’s life-experience is in short an essential catalyst and motivating factor for her whole practice. As what drives her and as what she depicts. One example in the early painting Le Château du Monstre et de la Mariée (Castle of the Monster and the Bride) (1955), which in a sombre universe depicts a magical castle with a white bride, a woman giving birth and a green dragon as the main figures. The work shows that Saint Phalle already at this early stage in her career was preoccupied with the roles of women, the bride as an anti-feminist symbol, motherhood and the struggle with the demons.

Self-narration became a recurring feature in her art. She was familiar with the existential philosophy of her time – had read Sartre and Camus – and the French philosopher, writer and feminist Simone de Beauvoir’s major work The Second Sex (1949), made a particularly strong impression.9 Nevertheless her works communicate at a very direct level.

“In my work I am condemned to reveal every emotion, thought, recollection, and experience. Transformed – they become other form, other colour, other texture.

Everything is used – great joys, desires, tragedies and pains. It is all subjective. It is all my life. Nothing is secret. I have nowhere to hide. Luckily, people cannot always see what they look at. It is their own past, their

Le Château du monstre et de la mariée (Castle of the Monster and the Bride), ca. 1955 Museum Tinguely, Basel (2)

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unconscious dreams that they see. Sometimes it is a glimpse of paradise or hell, or some elusive vision from some other time”.10 Theatrical and poetic femme fatale But Niki de Saint Phalle herself also knew how to narrate with empathy and conviction – through art, her autobiographies and not least in the autobiographical statements formulated as ‘letters’.11 Saint Phalle’s texts consist almost exclusively of highly charged statements that form her public persona. It is hard not to be seduced by her linguistic nerve and her sense of the theatrical.12 Things go pop, important words are written in CAPITALS, and there is no shortage of dramatic phrases when Saint Phalle tells the story: “I WOULD SHOW EVERYTHING. My heart, my emotions. Green – red – yellow – blue – violet.

Hate – love – laughter – fear – tenderness.”13 The ‘letters’ and the self-narration as such have the character of ‘works’ – they are close to poetry, and this complicates the use of her texts as biographical source material.14 For what is reality – and what is art? Similarly, the extensive print series Californian Diary (1993-94, pages 76-77) and My Love (1968, page 78) are based on fragmented memories. The works appear as illustrated, intimate letters or diary entries in which Saint Phalle creates a close dialogue with her reader/viewer by addressing a named recipient or a ‘you’. They are full of Saint Phalle’s pictograms, and like the ‘letters’ the graphic works are also carefully plotted notes. Here we are granted insight into the sender’s romantic relationships, journeys, everyday life and ups and downs in captivating compositions of text and image. The sender can be ‘Mary’ and ‘Agnes’, the signature is ‘Niki de Saint Phalle’, née Marie-Agnès.

Just as Saint Phalle used words and text as part of her self-representation, she also knew how to deploy the images of herself in the media strategically. For example she chose to appear to the public as a sensual, explosive and adventurous femme fatale, or as she formulated it in the fashion magazine Vogue: “I believe that my boas, my boots, my red dresses, my disguises – in fact! – are nothing but accessories of my creation, expressing more a desire to make myself into an object, like the celluloid dolls I use in my work. I use

my body in the same way I use a base of wire netting to make a sculpture.”15 Here Saint Phalle gives us a crucial key to the understanding of her art and her self-staging as two sides of the same coin. When she plays on her femininity, it is an essential part of her whole artistic production. The selfstaging is a major element in the ‘concept’ Niki de Saint Phalle. The equilibristic ability to build art around an image and a public persona shows her as an artist ahead of her time.16 Besides, the quotation illustrates that she is abreast of the female performance artists who in the course of the 1970s used their bodies as a canvas. Everywhere she obscures the boundary between her private self and her public persona, between documentation and fiction.

As a former photo model and aspiring actress she also showed great insight into the power of the mass media and the importance of visual culture. In it she found huge potential for communicating art and her messages widely. With her many TV appearance and interviews in the course of the 1960s, the first in April 1960, she became one of the frontline figures in the artistic new departures of the period.17 Saint Phalle knew the game; she was shrewd, sophisticated, funny and photogenic.

At the same time she subverted the stereotyped understanding of femininity and masculinity. Historic film clips and photos of the first shooting sessions vividly illustrate how she challenged the classic gender codes of the time: a lovely, petite woman in an ordinary blouse and skirt aiming a .22 gallery rifle stares down her target with a lethal gaze and pulls the trigger. The media loved her – and she had them hooked.

Perpetrator and performance pioneer The shooting-up of the Venus de Milo was neither the first nor the last shooting action by Niki de Saint Phalle.

In the preceding year she had in fact already aimed her sights at her own art in a vendetta against men of all shades. Jean Tinguely was present with Saint Phalle on 12 February 1961 when for the first time she aimed a borrowed revolver at one of her paintings and fired a shot.18 This was literally the starting shot for her Tirs (Shooting Paintings), which became the work series that established her as an artist and later ensured her

La Cathédrale rouge (The Red Cathedral), 1962. Collection MAMAC, Nice (15)

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a prominent place among the most experimental artists of the time. At first the works consisted of scrap, junk, eggs, pasta, tomatoes, all mounted on planks.

The works quickly developed into reliefs made of all sorts of bits and pieces, among them spray-cans and lumps of plaster that concealed pockets of paint that exploded and poured down over the surface when the bullets hit the mark. The Tirs (Shooting paintings) were created during a performative shooting event in which colleagues and audiences were also invited to participate. The entertaining shootings resulted in expressive, energetic artworks which, in a violent idiom, express anger, vulnerability, strength and optimism. The starting shot in the gender struggle had been fired!

With the Tirs (Shooting paintings) Saint Phalle assumed a new role as a female artist – she appeared as a ‘perpetrator’ and an energetic actor. In this way she manifested her feminist struggle against male-dominated society.

The works symbolized men, she ‘executed’ them, and they ‘bled’ when she shot them. The message was crystal-clear: the gender roles had to be redefined. In her shooting paintings Saint Phalle first and foremost ‘shot’ at men, their power and their dominance.

“1961 I shot against: Daddy, all men, small men, tall men, big men, fat men, men, my brother, society, the church, the convent school, my family, my mother, all men, Daddy, myself, men. I shot because it was fun and made me feel great. I shot because I was fascinated watching the painting bleed and die. I shot for that moment of magic.

Ecstasy. It was a moment of scorpionic truth. White purity. Sacrifice. Ready. Aim. Fire! Red, yellow, blue – the painting is crying, the painting is dead. I have killed the painting. It is reborn. War with no victims.”19 The ‘patriarch’ was in other words also under fire – with a personal nod to her own father. Saint Phalle’s final showdown with her father was played out in the both fictive and autobiographical feature film DADDY from 1973, which in an erotic and surreal universe and in caricatured and comical language parodied the patriarch as the head of the family who abuses his own daughter, and must subsequently be punished, ridiculed and executed. In the course of the film Saint Phalle (who herself plays the

main role) creates several works, including Daddy: Crucifix (1973) and Death of the Patriarch (1973), which is a major work and a milestone in her production. Finally, Saint Phalle was also shooting at herself and the violence she was carrying around within her. The demons were to be driven out and the anger was to be resolved: “The new bloodbath of red, yellow, and blue splattered over the pure white relief metamorphosized the painting into a tabernacle for DEATH and RESURRECTION. I was shooting at MYSELF, society with its INJUSTICES. I was shooting at my own violence and the VIOLENCE of the times. By shooting at my own violence, I no longer had to carry it inside of me like a burden. During the two years spent shooting I was not sick one day. It was a great therapy”.20 The reckoning with the past and the religious values that her family represented was now in full swing. In

the large-scale altar work Autel noir et blanc (Autel) (Black and White Altar (Altar) (1962, page 64) and the macabre relief La Cathédrale rouge (The Red Cathedral) (1962, page 15) she developed her shooting concept into thoroughly elaborated compositions consisting of religious figures and symbols, heaps of children’s toys and even a stuffed owl. The contempt for the Catholic Church, its power and its offensiveness – towards children as well as adults – is clear to anyone.

Saint Phalle insisted on making art accessible – making it popular and relevant. She wanted to take art to the people while at the same time waging a gender-political war. She was one of the very first to privilege the artistic process, situation and action – the performance itself – over the finished product. “The result doesn’t really interest me except as a document or a photograph. The only thing which really interests me is the spectacle, the event itself.”21 The situation and the participation of the

Tir-séance, 26 juin (June 26 Shooting Session), 1962. Collection MAMAC, Nice (12) Opposite page: Niki de Saint Phalle shooting Tir-séance, 26 juin (June 26 Shooting Session), Impasse Ronsin, 1961. Photo: Shunk-Kender

Next spread: Two fragments from the shooting session at Galerie Køpcke: Drame du coup de feu (Shooting Drama), 1961 Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (9) Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely in Galerie Køpcke, 1961. Photo: Willy Henriksen, Scanpix

audience were in other words more important than the artwork as object. Fortunately, many of her Tirs (Shooting paintings) and reliefs are preserved, after all. In the course of the two years when Saint Phalle worked with the them she inscribed herself in history as one of the pioneers among the performance artists. Her view of the relationship between action, audience and artwork were ground-breaking. She performed her shooting actions in New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Stockholm, as well as Copenhagen in the small but leading Galerie Køpcke in connection with her and Jean Tinguely’s participation in the exhibition Motion in Art at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 1961. But it was in the legendary Paris locality the Impasse Ronsin that she refined her technique and created some of her most magnificent works. One of them is the colossal relief Tir-séance, 26 juin (June 26 Shooting Session) (1961, page 17), which with its explosion of colours and objects is an extravagant demonstration of her unique artistic method.

Per Olof Ultvedt, Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, Dylaby, Amsterdam.

1962. Photo: Christer Strömholm

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Niki, art and the New Realists Niki de Saint Phalle was self-taught as an artist, but through her studio space in the creative hot-spot, the cul-de-sac Impasse Ronsin in Paris, she found both a network and inspiration. This was where, surrounded by a dynamic, creative milieu consisting of artists, curators and art critics, the shooting actions first and foremost took place. This was also where she met Jean Tinguely, who became crucially important to her – first as a colleague and sparring partner, but soon as a private and professional ‘partner in crime’. Tinguely, who was famous, indeed notorious, was a member of the innovative artist group Nouveaux Réalistes (New Realists) and had the right connections. During one of the first shooting actions Saint Phalle thus met the art critic Pierre Restany, who was behind the group. He became so enthusiastic about her art and her challenge to classic ‘autonomous’ painting that he immediately invited her to join the New Realists. As the only female member Saint Phalle was

an integral part of the group, and she took on a quite central role thanks to her bilingual skills.

Restany established the New Realists in 1960 in Paris as a reaction to the American Abstract Expressionists and the French École de Paris, and in its own way New Realism was a counterpart to Conceptual and Pop Art. The group included among others Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely, who struggled together against the elitist status of art. The group had close American connections, especially with the like-minded artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who collaborated closely with Saint Phalle on several works.

The main media were collage, assemblage and painting, and although the expression differed among the New Realists, their goal was clear: art was to reflect real life.

For that reason they often made use of recycled material and everyday objects in their works, which were both a critique of the consumer society and a break with the

traditional boundaries of art. They all cultivated Dadaism and idolized Duchamp and his readymades. Saint Phalle too was a fan, but was rather less narrow in her choice of sources of inspiration. She absorbed the art-historical abundance of Paris and made frequent visits to the art museums. She was enthusiastic about the outsider artist Ferdinand Cheval and the architect Antoni Gaudí as well as Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, Dubuffet and Brancusi. The last mentioned also lived in the Impasse Ronsin, and despite their different forms of artistic expression they often exchanged ideas over a bottle of champagne.22 Saint Phalle refused to take any particular side, and was not happy being categorized. Certainly not with Pop Art. Or feminism.23 Restany hit off her action-based method very well when, with Pollock in mind, he called her shooting paintings “drip revolver paintings”.24 Female Power, Black Power, Nana Power Once the gunsmoke, the fury and the ecstasy had

Marilyn, 1964 Niki Charitable Art Foundation (27)

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settled, Niki de Saint Phalle embarked on a self-searching investigation of identity. She moved from aggression and action to an internal exploration of the female identity by focusing specifically on representations of women and the idea of the feminine.25 With humour, exuberance and intense irony she depicted women in the standard roles: as bride, as housewife, as pregnant, as giving birth, as witch, as sex symbol and as blueeyed girl. She herself played the militant Amazon when she shot her paintings to pieces. There are sad fates such as the dead bride in the major work La Mariée sous l’arbre (The Bride beneath the Tree) (1964, page 36), eaten up by boredom and lack of recognition. And then there is Marilyn (1964, page 21), the portrait of the most feted actress of the 1950s, who was so unhappy that she took her own life. In their raw and grotesque form the pictures of women are a critical response to the conventional notions of and prejudices about the normal female roles and the definition of femininity.

The witches and the women giving birth represent sexuality, strength and superiority, and the many wellrounded, imposing ladies – all called Nana – represent the essence of the artist’s mission for female emancipation, equality and empowerment.

The Nanas are colourful and festive sculptures of women which pay tribute to the forms of the female body and express joy and self-confidence. They are sensual, corpulent women who light-footedly leap and dance in large-flowered bathing suits. Each with its own expression, Les Trois Grâces (The Three Graces) (1995-2003, page 4) and Nana au ballon (Nana with ball) (1971) are exemplary. ‘Nana’ is French slang for a young woman and also the name of a prostitute in Émile Zola’s novel of the same name – and Saint Phalle’s favourite childhood nanny was of course called ‘Nana’. For her the series was synonymous with strong, life-affirming women who, most of all, are free of the body and beauty ideals that the artist herself embodied as a photo model and cover girl. With a reference to the American battle cry for racial equality, ‘Black Power’, Saint Phalle called the Nanas’ fighting spirit and attitude ‘Nana Power’. According to the artist, women and Afro-Americans were equally disadvantaged in the (white) male-dominated world. The Nanas sparkle, they are untrammeled,

Previous spread: Black is Different, 1994. From the Californian Diary. Niki Charitable Art Foundation (100)

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undaunted and bursting with self-confidence. They almost boil over with all their friskiness and lust for life.

Critical voices asked – and still ask – whether the tiny heads of the Nanas can in reality hold a critical thought.

The series may also seem like a hopelessly naive comment from a petite, skinny former model that ‘big is beautiful’. For is it really?26 But whatever the effect of the form and content of the Nanas on the individual viewer, the message of self-confidence, courage and vitality can still inspire us today when the ideal images of the fashion and beauty industry are still dominant.

From the Greek Venus, the foremost symbol of feminine beauty, Saint Phalle moved here to a different classic figure: the ‘Venus of Willendorf’, who symbolizes fertility.

She realized the giant mother-Nana Hon – A Cathedral in collaboration with Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1966 (pages 52-53).27 A 25-metre-long birth-giving woman whose pregnant body was at once a gender-political manifestation and a festive funhouse that the museum’s visitors could explore by entering the vagina. Just so. Saint Phalle worked with the Nanas all through her life, and with their strong attitude and political power they have become her most popular and best known work series: the Nanas have been sent out into the world in their hundreds in cheeky get-ups, with joyful vitality, self-confidence and a twinkle in the eye as their deadliest weapons.

Monumental visions and a magic garden According to Niki de Saint Phalle, bringing delight, humour and colour into life was the starting point for her creativity and all her creations. The monumental architectural projects that she began at the end of the 1960s were a central part of this vision – from large public sculptures in Europe and the USA, through the Stravinsky Fountain outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris, to playgrounds in Belgium, Israel and California.

The great majority of the projects were implemented in collaboration with Jean Tinguely, for although the couple separated in 1973, their friendship and admiration for each other’s work did not come to an end.

From 1974 until 1998 Saint Phalle realized her life’s masterpiece, the Giardino dei Tarocchi (Tarot Garden):

Nana au ballon (Nana with ball), 1971 KUNSTEN Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg (75)

a unique sculpture park with extravagant buildings, enchanting arcades and colossal sculptures created with inspiration in the symbolic figures of the Tarot Cards (pages 26-27). In 1955 she had visited Gaudí’s Park Güell in Barcelona and knew instantly that she would one day embark on the construction of her own sculpture park.

This too was her destiny. With Park Güell as her model the magic garden was created with an aesthetic at least as sparkling and spectacular. As in many of her other works, the mirror is a leitmotif which she herself associates with a kind of ‘feminine feminism’:

“I did not want to reject my mother entirely. I retained things from her that have given me a lot of pleasure – my love of clothes, fashion, hats, dressing up, mirrors. My mother had lots of mirrors in her house. Years later, mirrors would become one of the main materials I would use in the Tarot Garden in Italy and The Cyclops in the Forest of Fontainebleau outside Paris. My mother was a great lover of music, art, good food and had a certain style and charm. These things I took from her and they helped me to stay in touch with a certain part of my femininity.”28

The work with the garden and the other large sculptural projects illustrates Saint Phalle’s artistic courage and uncompromising nature. She laboured hard to obtain the financing: she worked on commissions, developed editions, designed a perfume bottle and mass-produced inflatable Nana balloons. The price of her lifelong dedication to art had been so high that the mission had to be accomplished: “I felt that I had done such a terrible thing leaving my family that I buried myself 100% in my work for the rest of my life to make up for it. I needed to prove that what I had done had not been in vain and had been worthwhile”.29 In the course of the more than 20 years when the sculpture park the Tarot Garden was built, Saint Phalle lived for several years in the garden itself – in the belly of The Empress – using it as her base for site meetings, delegating the work and serving tea and cookies for the workers. The Empress has its origin in the exuberant Nanas and especially the Hon-installation, now in the form of a house moulded as a sphinx.

Niki de Saint Phalle had sincere visions of changing the world through art. Quite specifically, she dreamed of a matriarchal utopia: a paradisal world ruled by women in which children and adults lived a life of reconciliation, tolerance and harmony. The architectural projects all bear the marks of this vision. They are utopian as well as performative, and they were created to change the world into a better place.

The Unique Niki Power In 1993 Niki de Saint Phalle settled in California, where she died in 2002 of a lung condition – she had a genetic

notes 1 The brain behind the show The Construction of Boston was the author Kenneth Koch, and the choreographer Merce Cunningham marshalled the troops on the evening itself.

Koch’s sense of drama was masterful, and Cunningham knew how to cobble a

Previous spread: Panoramic view of the Tarot Garden Photo: Laurent Condominas

spectacular stage show together for his audience. For further information see Sarah Wilson, “Tirs, Tears, Ricochets”, in Niki de Saint Phalle: 1930-2002, exhibition catalogue, Grand Palais, Paris and Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, 2015.

predisposition for lung disease and had also been permanently damaged by the work amidst the toxic polyester fumes. With an artistic career that spanned over 40 years she obtained a central position on the international art scene. She left behind her a practice that stands out in innumerable respects: artistically, aesthetically and conceptually. She developed a style all her own in which it was quite natural to be both sincere and dramatic, furious and sensitive, fearless and terrified of creeping things.

By exploring the various roles associated with femininity, she unstintingly portrayed women’s defeats, emancipation, victories and triumphs. Throughout her career she created painterly artworks which were at the same time decidedly action- and idea-based. Saint Phalle’s art is equally process and product, Duchamp and Picasso, feminine and masculine, honest and staged. But what first and foremost remains is the consistent feminist and visionary power – the unique and original Niki Power that permeates the whole of her variegated life’s work.

Niki de Saint Phalle had a zest for life only granted to the few, and her universe is violent and sombre, colourful and humorous all at once. In one fell swoop she could ravage classical art and destroy the notion of the ideal feminine beauty when she massacred Venus de Milo.

She may not have mastered the classic artistic media to perfection, but that was a secondary consideration for her, as it is for us who look on with excitement today.

For the themes and the messages are still relevant. The points and the criticism come crashing through so one is almost blown away. Niki de Saint Phalle and her Niki Power are beyond categorization.

Naja Rasmussen holds an MA in Visual Culture and is curator at ARKEN Museum of Modern Art

3 Niki de Saint Phalle, “Dear Pontus”, in Pontus Hultén (ed.), Niki de Saint Phalle, exhibition catalogue, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, 1992, 147-148.

4 Saint Phalle, “Dear Pontus”, 149.

2 Sarah Wilson, “Tirs, Tears, Ricochets”, 96.

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5 Niki de Saint Phalle, Harry and me. The Family Years, 1950-1960, Switzerland: Benteli Verlags AG, 2006, 52.

6 Niki de Saint Phalle, Mon Secret, Paris: La Différence, 1994 (French).

7 Quoted in Niki de Saint Phalle: 1930-2002, 78.

8 Niki de Saint Phalle: “I felt an enormous productive capacity inside me. But I paid very dearly for my passion for art. On its behalf, I did the worst thing a woman can do: I abandoned my children. I abandoned them as men often do for their work. In that way, I gave myself a good reason for feeling guilty. I still feel that sensation of guilt today.

I adored my children.” Niki de Saint Phalle, Traces, Une autobiographie. Remembering 1930-1949, Lausanne: Acatos, 1999, 90.

9 Saint Phalle, Harry and me.

The Family Years, 1950-1960, 30.

10 Niki de Saint Phalle, Monographie – Monograph, Lausanne: Editions Acatos, 2001, 64.

11 For an in-depth study of Niki de Saint Phalle’s letters, see Isabelle Schwarz, “Opening the Letters of Niki de Saint Phalle” in Not a Day Without a Line: Understanding artists’ writings, Gent: Academia Press, 2013.

Schwarz concludes that the letters are extremely personal artistic expression in form and content. They are meticulously staged, but should still be regarded as part of her autobiography.

12 As Amelia Jones points out in her article “Wild Maid, Wild

Soul, A Wild Wild Weed: Niki de Saint Phalle’s Fierce Femininities, ca. 1960-66”, in Niki de Saint Phalle: 1930-2002, this very recognition calls for a certain self-critical reflection – especially when the source material is partly based on autobiographical texts.

13 Niki de Saint Phalle, “Dear Mother”, in Pontus Hultén (ed.), Niki de Saint Phalle, 186.

14 Her own daughter Laura was of course also aware that there were two sides to every case, and when she took the initiative for the publication of the biography Harry and me. The Family Years, 1950-1960 she accepted the consequences and even chose to let her father (the ex-husband of Saint Phalle) comment on and correct Saint Phalle’s accounts.

15 Maurice Rheims, “Niki de Saint Phalle, L’Art et les mecs”, Vogue, Paris, 2. 1965.

16 Her artistic concept was so consistent and interwoven with her gender-political views and her seductive public persona that in her own time only Andy Warhol seems to have surpassed her in self-aware media performance.

17 Catherine Gonnard: ”Niki de Saint Phalle, Figurehead of the

Avantgarde on Television”, in Niki de Saint Phalle: 1930-2002, 110-113.

18 Saint Phalle, “Dear Pontus”, 160.

19 Niki de Saint Phalle, in Niki de Saint Phalle, Who is the monster? You or Me? Produced by Peter Scamoni, duration 92 min., 1992.

20 Saint Phalle, “Dear Pontus”, 161-162.

21 Niki de Saint Phalle, letter to Harry Mathews, 1961. In “Pop Gun Art – Art Expanded, 1958-1978”, Walker Art Center. http://www.walkerart.org/ collections/publications/artexpanded/pop-gun/ (last visited 8.01.2016) 22 Saint Phalle, Harry and me.

The Family Years, 1950-1960, 87.

23 In an interview in the New York Times Saint Phalle explains why: “I have always refused to be in a feminist show because I do not see the world in that way. I’m a feminist in that I believe passionately in equal wages, equal opportunities and so on.

But there’s a war going on between the sexes in the United States. A lot of women are getting very macho, and it’s going to be very interesting to see

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where that goes. But I believe that if we behave like men, we end up with less. For myself, I love the company of men, I like the European game of flirting, I like to live my femininity and I think it is fun to rouler les hommes; you know, manipulate them a little.” Roger Cohen, “AT HOME WITH: Niki de Saint Phalle; An Artist, Her Monsters, Her Two Worlds.” New York Times, 7.10. 1993.

24 Cathrine Francblin, Niki de Saint Phalle, la révolte à l’œuvre, Vauves Cedex: Hazan, 105.

25 See Camille Morineau’s article on Niki de Saint Phalle’s depictions of women in the present catalogue, 31-49 26 Amy Sherlock / Francesca Gavin, review of Niki de Saint Phalle, Guggenheim Bilbao, Frieze, no. 172, 2015, 192.

27 For a thorough account and reception analysis of Hon – a Cathedral, see Camilla Jalving’s article in the present catalogue, 51-62.

28 Saint Phalle, “Dear Pontus”, 148.

29 Saint Phalle, Harry and me.

The Family Years, 1950-1960, 127.

Rebel, feminist and ground-breaking artist, Niki de Saint Phalle positioned herself as one of the most radical and visionary imagemakers of the 20th century. Her art ranges wide: from wild shooting actions to sensual ‘Nanas’ and magical playgrounds. With humour, horror and honesty she combines strong views on gender roles and equality with eternal issues like love, joie de vivre and personal emancipation. This catalogue homes in on Niki de Saint Phalle’s life and work. Her self-assured stagings, innovative performance practice, riotous depictions of women and utopian visions for a better world are still relevant today.

Articles by: Naja Rasmussen Camille Morineau Camilla Jalving Victoria Christiansen

Buy the catalogue at ARKEN or order it at reception@arken.dk