Niki de Saint-Phalle: Agony and Ecstasy

Niki de Saint Phalle, Californian Diary (Tempérance), 1994 — Niki de Saint Phalle, *Californian Diary (Tempérance),* 1994

By Irina Sheynfeld

I became jealous of my master, Gaudi.
He was so lucky to have his Duke support him in making a miraculous park.
I, a woman, was making the largest sculpture garden since Gaudi.
Maybe this is why I met so much resistance.

-- Niki de Saint Phalle

The colorful butterfly of modern art Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) was a French American artist who defied conventions, practiced her femme fatale version of feminism, and helped move the art world from the static into the participatory realm. Her first major US exhibition, Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life, featuring over 200 works, is now open at MoMA P.S.1. For New Yorkers who do not reside in Long Island City, a trip to P.S.1, (a vacant public school built in 1892, abandoned due to lack of enrollment in 1963, and turned into a museum in 1976) is a pilgrimage that is reserved for very special cases, but Saint Phalle’s eccentric art is worth the voyage.

Saint Phalle became known in New York and European art circles of the 60s when she started staging her Tirs, shooting performances, with various nouveaux réalistes: Yves Klein, Christo, Raymond Haines, Gerard Deschamps, Pierre Restany, and her life-long partner in life and art, Jean Tinguely (1925-1991.) Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were among those who were invited to participate. The first Tir event took place on February 12, 1961, in an obscure alley of Montparnasse that led to the entrance of the hospital morgue, Impasse Ronsin. In her Tirs, Saint Phalle and her friends mostly shot at the “prepared” assemblages of seemingly random objects covered with plaster and painted white. On top of these sculptural collages, Saint Phalle attached small balloons which contained fresh paint. During her shooting performances, the artist would shoot at balloons, and drips of paint would transform the assemblage into a colorful mess of liquids, thus completing a painting. The work was performative and collaborative by nature and the resulting pieces look deceivingly spontaneous while being carefully planned. There are numerous enchanting photos of the artist, a former Vogue model, in various sexy outfits shooting or taking aim at the prepared canvases.

Today, Saint Phalle is better known for her monumental public works such as La Fontaine Stravinsky (1983), located in Paris next to the Pompidou Center, and Queen Califia’s Magical Circle (2003), the artist’s last major international project, created for the City of Escondido, California. P.S. 1’s Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life focuses on the development and progress of these works from her first outdoor sculptural group, on which she collaborated with Tinguely: Le Paradis Fantastique (Fantastic Paradise) from 1967 to her magnum opus – The Tarot Garden (1979-2002), located near Capalbio in Tuscany, which opened its doors to the public in 1998.

In the first room of the exhibition, there is a stand with photographs and other materials documenting the progress of Le Paradis Fantastique. The work is an example of one of the earliest collaborations between Saint Phalle and Tinguely. It was a sculptural group commissioned by the French government for Expo ’67 in Montreal. The theme of the composition was “life confronted with the forces of distraction,” and it consisted of Saint Phalle’s nine large and colorful Nanas (the French equivalent for “chicks,” “broads,” or “girls”) attacked by Tinguely’s black and sharp machines. It is important to note that a figure of the large-breasted and small-headed Nana is a recurring motif in Saint Phalle’s work. The P.S.1 exhibition displays a copy of New York magazine from June 3, 1968; it describes one of the first encounters that New Yorkers had with Le Paradis:

On the first morning of May, a class of yawning kindergarteners from P.S. 113 marched through the gate, in traditionally mute two-by-twos. Their eyes fell out. Dropped on the grass, on their bullseye rumps and lollipop heads, and atop a cuckoo flying machine, were giantesses and animals brighter than a circus and bigger than anybody’s TV. Pointed at each of the frolicking forms was a muzzle or scythe, corkscrew, or fork tines of a crotchety black man-of-war machine. It was just as Administration and Cultural Affairs had hoped. The children were astonished. [1]

Installation view of Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life at MoMA P.S.1 — Installation view of *Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life* at MoMA P.S.1

Another public project that is explored at P.S. 1’s show is Golem, which was constructed between 1971-1972 in the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood of Jerusalem. It was commissioned by the Israel Museum and initially, city officials were reluctant to approve Saint Phalle’s proposal. The story of the golem, a monster created out of clay by Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late-16th century rabbi of Prague, to protect the Jewish people from pogroms, was well known by locals and seemed too dark and scary for a children’s playground. But they soon relented, probably after seeing the artist's colorful drawings made for the proposal. The Mifletzet (monster), as it is now known in Israel, is a beloved part of the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood. The monster is a black and white dragon with three red tongues – slides that come out of his open mouth. The interior is a playhouse. Jerusalem council member Laura Wharton said that “The wonderful slides of this well-known statue became a symbol of the area and of the city.”[2] In The Times of Israel, Jessica Steinberg wrote that Saint Phalle once received a letter from Teddy Kolleck, the first and very popular mayor of Jerusalem, telling her that her sculpture attracted more visitors than the Western Wall. Visitors to P.S.1, however, will see a collage of both Saint Phalle’s drawings and sketches of the sculpture and a photograph of the finished work.

Finally, the stars of the P.S. 1 show are the maquettes for the Giardino dei Tarocci, or Tarot Garden (1979-2002), a park of giant sculptures based on the twenty-two major arcana cards from the Tarot deck. When Saint Phalle was 25, she visited Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güel (1900) in Barcelona and her fate was sealed: “All at once, I encountered my master and my destiny. I trembled. I knew that one day, I too would build a garden of joy. A little corner of paradise.”[3]

The Tarot Garden is Saint Phalle’s sculptural autobiography, and she considered it the most important work of her life. Lucia Perapane, in her chapter “The Tarot Garden: Between symbolic imagery and personal mythologies,” from Niki de Saint Phalle (2017), argues that “Tarot Garden … is the astral autobiography of the artist herself, the search for an inner equilibrium that has taken up her entire life, the triumph of wisdom over juvenile fears.” The major arcana cards represent a collection of the twenty-two popular western archetypes: The Fool, The Magician, The Empress, The Lovers, Wheel of Fortune, and Death, to name a few. Saint Phalle used them to tell her own life story and the story of her time: The High Priestess, The Magician, The Empress, and Strength are all Saint Phalle’s alter egos. They are mothers, artists, and lovers dancing around clad in shining mosaics. The Emperor, typically represented as an old man, is here represented by a phallic red rocket, suggesting the aggression and unresolved anger that the artist felt toward both her father and the French military actions of her youth.

The darker path of the garden leads the visitor to The Devil and Death. Pesapane further maintains that “The Devil is the card of the loss of spiritual liberty and of sexuality. At the age of eleven Niki was raped by her father, at twenty-two she was interned in a psychiatric hospital and sedated with electric shock treatment, and at thirty she abandoned her husband and children.”

One of the central sculptures in the garden, The Empress, is represented in the form of a giant sphinx, a feminine principle, into which the artist incorporated Greek and Egyptian iconography. The maquette for The Empress is part of the P.S.1 show. Its hair is cobalt blue, and the voluminous breasts are decorated with a heart and a flower motif. There is a small door between the breasts, which indicates that the sculpture was once a dwelling where Saint Phalle lived for seven years while working on The Garden. In her 2016 article “Beautiful Monsters” from The New Yorker, Ariel Levy describes the sculptural dwelling:

Amid peaceful olive groves and ochre fields grazed by horses and sheep sits a house-size sculpture of a sphinx, with mirrored blue hair and a bright-red crown, a flower blooming on one of her breasts and a lavender heart on the nipple of the other. The interior is covered in shards of the mirror as if a colossal disco ball had been turned inside out. (During the two decades that Saint Phalle worked on the garden, her bedroom was inside one breast, her kitchen in the other.)[4]

What was it like for Saint Phalle, who discovered art in an asylum, where she was treated with electroshock, to live inside her own creation for seven years? We know that Tinguely, who helped the artist build armatures for the giant sculptures, no longer lived with her. Locals, who still help to maintain The Tarot Garden, recall the stories of how Saint Phalle involved so many of them in its creation. Levi argues that: “Making the Tarot Garden cost Saint Phalle a great deal: her health, decades of her life, millions of dollars. But, in the process, she managed to mother an entire community.” Locals worked on the garden alongside the artist's friends, whom she invited to come from abroad. Tuscan winters are mild, but inside the unheated cement interior, it must have been cold and dusty. Saint Phalle suffered from numerous illnesses throughout her life including arthritis and respiratory failures, which eventually forced her to leave her garden and find a new and final home in San Diego, California.

In 1991, Tinguely passed away and that year Saint Phalle installed The Fool in her Tarot Garden. There is a simple blue wireframe model for the sculpture in the P.S.1 show. The Fool is transparent; he has almost no material presence. In the traditional Tarot deck, The Fool has no value; his card is sometimes placed at the beginning of the deck and sometimes at the end: he doesn’t have a fixed location. Saint Phalle wrote in Le Jardin des Tarots (1997), “he represents man on his spiritual quest, not knowing where he is going. The Fool is ready to make discoveries. He looks weak, but in fact, he has the ability to find treasure.” In the traditional Tarot decks, The Fool is always depicted as a man on the go. He is carefree, young and he doesn’t carry a lot of worldly possessions. If The Fool has a sack, it is never big. Sometimes he is a wandering troubadour, a circus performer, or just a beggar. The Fool is usually barefoot and in rags, but he is always free, and all the roads are open for him. This must be Niki de Saint Phalle’s card.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dossin, Catherine. "Niki de Saint-Phalle and the Masquerade of Hyperfemininity." Woman's Art Journal 31, no. 2 (2010): 29-38. Accessed April 12, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41331082.

Levy, Ariel. “The Psychedelic Garden of Tuscany.” The New Yorker. Accessed April 19, 2021. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/niki-de-saint-phalles-tarot-garden.

Mazzanti, Anna, and Saint Phalle Niki de. Niki De Saint Phalle: the Tarot Garden: Created on the Occasion of the Exhibition "Il Giardino Dei Tarocchi Di Niki De Saint Phalle" AtOrbetello, Po Lveriera Guzman in 1997. Milan: Charta, 1998.

Saint-Phalle, Niki de. Traces: An Autobiography Remembering 1930-1949, Autobiography, Volume I (Lausanne, Switzerland: Acatos, 1999)

Sorkin, Jenni. "Niki de Saint-Phalle's Standing Nana with Serpent." Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin, 2009, 101-05. Accessed April 12, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40682635.

NOTES

[1] “Le Paradis Fantastique on the Roof Garden of the French Pavilion in Montreal, Expo '67.” New York Magazine, June 3, 1968.

[2] Jessica Steinberg, “Jerusalemites Fear for the Monster Slide Park,” The Times of Israel, February 20, 2014, https://www.timesofisrael.com/jerusalemites-fear-for-the-monster-slide-park/.

[3] Anna Mazzanti and Saint Phalle Niki de, Niki De Saint Phalle: The Tarot Garden: Created on the Occasion of the Exhibition "Il Giardino Dei Tarocchi di Niki De Saint Phalle" AtOrbetello, Po Lveriera Guzman in 1997 (Milan: Charta, 1998), p.2.

[4] Ariel Levy, “The Psychedelic Garden of Tuscany,” The New Yorker, accessed April 19, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/niki-de-saint-phalles-tarot-garden.

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