Niki de Saint Phalle

Biography

The first “shooting” took place on 12 February 1961 in the Impasse Ronsin in Paris. Relief paintings with bags of paint, eggs and tomatoes, fixed to boards and covered in plaster, were shot at by the artist with a rifle, and the paint ran down the white surface. Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri and Pierre Restany stood nearby.

Restany soon invited her to join the New Realists. She remained the only woman in the group.

She was born on 29 October 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the second of five children of a French banker, Count André-Marie de Saint Phalle, and an American, Jeanne Jacqueline Harper. A few months later her father closed his business because of the Great Depression, her parents left for the United States, and the girl stayed with her grandparents in Nièvre. Around 1933 she was brought to her parents, from 1937 the family lived in New York, and Catherine-Marie-Agnès came to be called Niki. Her schooling was ragged: she was expelled from a convent school in 1941, then from the Brearley School in 1944 for painting the fig leaves on classical statues red, after which came another convent school and another expulsion. She graduated from the Oldfields School in Maryland in 1947. She said later that it was at Brearley that she became a feminist. At sixteen she appeared on the cover of Life, at twenty-two on the cover of French Vogue, and she was photographed for Elle and Harper’s Bazaar.

At eighteen she married the poet Harry Mathews; the civil ceremony took place on 6 June 1949 in New York, the church wedding in February 1950. Their daughter Laura was born in April 1951, and their son Philip in May 1955 in Mallorca. In 1952 the family moved to Paris, where Niki attended drama school. In 1953 she found herself in a clinic in Nice. By her own account, that was where she began to paint: “I started painting among the mad.” She had no formal art training. The American-French painter Hugh Weiss urged her not to give up the naïve, self-taught manner. In Spain she was struck by Madrid and Barcelona, above all by Gaudí and Park Güell; she recalled later that Gaudí had determined her dream of a fantastic garden. Her first exhibition of oil paintings was held in Switzerland in 1956.

That same year she met Jean Tinguely, who made kinetic sculptures from machine parts and scrap. She made her first sculpture with his help: he welded an iron armature, and she covered it with plaster and painted it. In 1959 the work of Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Daniel Spoerri and others made her give up oil paint for assemblages of household objects. In 1960 she and Mathews separated by agreement, and the children stayed with their father. In the same year Tinguely introduced her to Pontus Hultén, director of the Moderna Museet, the modern art museum in Stockholm, who went on to acquire her work. She married Tinguely on 13 July 1971; they separated two years before his death, but worked together to the end.

The “shootings” moved into galleries and museums. In June 1961 she and Tinguely, together with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, took part in John Cage’s concert-happening “Variations II” at the American Embassy in Paris. In 1962 she had her first solo exhibition in New York, at Alexander Iolas’s gallery, where visitors could shoot at her work. By 1963 she had shot, in Los Angeles, a large assemblage, “King Kong”, with faces of politicians, among them Kennedy, Castro and de Gaulle; the Stockholm museum later bought it.

Then came women. In 1963–64 she made figures of ghostly brides and women giving birth, which critics compared to Miss Havisham in “Great Expectations”. The figures then became brighter and more cheerful: full-bodied, dancing, standing on their hands. A drawing by Larry Rivers of his pregnant wife, Clarice, helped her. From 1965 the series has been called Nanas, after a French slang word roughly meaning “broad”. Her materials were at first papier-mâché, wool and cloth, then fibreglass and polyester resin.

The largest Nana appeared in Stockholm in 1966: “Hon” (“She”), a reclining pregnant woman about 25 metres long, made with Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt. The entrance was an opening between her legs. Inside were a cinema with twelve seats, a milk bar, a fish pond and a “brain” of Tinguely’s mechanisms. Eight people built it in forty days, more than 100,000 people visited it, and after three months it was demolished, leaving only the head. In the same period she worked in the theatre, designing sets and costumes for Roland Petit’s ballet “Éloge de la folie” and for “Lysistrata”. In 1967, at Expo 67 in Montreal, her figures stood alongside Tinguely’s machines in “Le Paradis Fantastique”.

In 1972, commissioned by Jerusalem’s mayor Teddy Kollek, she made “Golem” for a children’s playground, a monster with three red tongues that serve as slides. In 1974 three huge Nanas were set up on the bank of the Leine in Hanover. Residents sent more than 20,000 letters of complaint, and then the statues were given affectionate names. From 1969, with Tinguely and others, she worked on “Le Cyclop” in the forest at Milly-la-Forêt; it was declared finished in 1994.

She conceived the Tarot Garden in Tuscany in the footsteps of Gaudí, Ferdinand Cheval’s Palais Idéal at Hauterives and the Park of the Monsters at Bomarzo, as a garden made by a woman. From 1979 she laid out the site in an abandoned quarry, and in 1980 work began on the first sculpture. Figures up to fifteen metres high, representing the 22 cards of the Major Arcana, were built of steel and sprayed concrete and covered with ceramic, mirrors and polished stones. For several years she lived inside “The Empress”: her bedroom in one breast, her kitchen in the other. The money came from sales of her works and from a perfume bearing her name. In 1982, with Tinguely, she made the Stravinsky Fountain for Paris, beside the Centre Pompidou. The garden opened on 15 May 1998.

In August 1991 Tinguely died in Bern. She made her first kinetic works, the Méta-Tinguelys, and worked to establish the Tinguely Museum in Basel. In 1994 she published her memoir “Mon secret” (“My Secret”). I would also mention her book on AIDS prevention for schoolchildren, which was translated into five languages. Because of her health she moved in 1994 to La Jolla, California. Her last monumental work was “Queen Califia’s Magical Circle” in Escondido. In 2000 she became an honorary citizen of Hanover and gave the city’s Sprengel Museum more than 400 works.

Niki de Saint Phalle died on 21 May 2002 in La Jolla, near San Diego.