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
8
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