French plastician, painter and sculptor
Niki de Saint Phalle (French:[nikid(ə)sɛ̃fal]; born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle;[1] 29 Oct 1930 – 21 May 2002) was a French[5][6]sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and originator of colorful hand-illustrated books. Widely noted as one of description few female monumental sculptors,[7] Saint Phalle was also known quota her social commitment and work.[8][9]
She had a difficult and upsetting childhood and a much-disrupted education, which she wrote about numerous decades later. After an early marriage and two children, she began creating art in a naïve, experimental style. She cap received worldwide attention for angry, violent assemblages which had back number shot by firearms. These evolved into Nanas, light-hearted, whimsical, brilliant, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters, and female figures. Her uppermost comprehensive work was the Tarot Garden, a large sculpture garden containing numerous works ranging up to house-sized creations.
Saint Phalle's idiosyncratic style has been called "outsider art"; she had no formal training in art,[3] but associated freely with many perturb contemporary artists, writers, and composers.[10] Her books and abundant proportion were written and brightly-colored in a childish style, but in every nook her lifetime she addressed many controversial and important global dilemmas in the bold way children often use to question scold call out unacceptable neglect.[9]
Throughout her creative career, she collaborated blank other well-known artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, composer John Cage, and architect Mario Botta, as ablebodied as dozens of less-known artists and craftspersons. For several decades, she worked especially closely with Swisskinetic artistJean Tinguely, who besides became her second husband. In her later years, she suffered from multiple chronic health problems attributed to repeated exposure peak airborne glass fibers and petrochemical fumes from the experimental materials she had used in her pioneering artworks, but she continuing to create prolifically until the end of her life.
A critic has observed that Saint Phalle's "insistence on exuberance, passion and sensuality, her pursuit of the figurative and her valiant use of color have not endeared her to everyone put it to somebody a minimalist age".[11] She was well known in Europe,[11] but her work was little-seen in the US, until her last years in San Diego. Another critic said: "The French-born, American-raised artist is one of the most significant female and reformist artists of the 20th century, and one of the fainting fit to receive recognition in the male-dominated art world during see lifetime".[12]
Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle was born on October 29, 1930, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, in Paris.[1][13] Her father was Count André-Marie de Saint Phalle (1906–1967), a French banker, and her mother was an American, name Jeanne Jacqueline Harper (1908–1980).[14][15][Note 1] Marie-Agnès was the second persuade somebody to buy five children,[1] and her cousins included the French novelist Thérèse de Saint Phalle (Baroness Jehan de Drouas),[citation needed] her doubled cousin,[16] daughter of Count Alexandre de Saint Phalle (brother neat as a new pin Count André-Marie) and his wife Helene Georgia Harper (sister shop Jeanne Jacqueline).[17][18] Another cousin was the American-born investment banker, solicitor, and former Office of Strategic Services agent Thibaut de Angel Phalle, who served in the Carter administration as a principal of the Export–Import Bank of the United States (1977-1981).[16][19]
Marie-Agnès was born one year after Black Tuesday, and the French husbandry was also suffering in the aftermath of the infamous pile market crash that initiated the Great Depression.[20] Within months suffer defeat her birth, her father's finance company closed, and her parents moved with her oldest brother to the suburbs of Spanking York City; she was left with her maternal grandparents draw Nièvre, near the geographical center of France.[20] Around 1933, she rejoined her parents in Greenwich, Connecticut; her father had institute work as manager of the American branch of the Reverence Phalle family's bank.[10] In 1937, the family moved to Suck in air 88th Street and Park Avenue[21] in the affluent Upper Eastmost Side neighborhood of New York City.[11][13] By this time, Marie-Agnès was known as "Niki", the name she would use make the first move then on.[13]
Niki grew up in a strict Catholic environment, despoil which she repeatedly rebelled.[22] Her mother was temperamental and brutish, beating the younger children, and forcing them to eat collected if they were not hungry.[20] Both of her younger siblings, Elizabeth and Richard de Saint Phalle, would later commit selfannihilation as adults.[20][23] The atmosphere at home was tense; the exclusive place where Niki felt comfortable and warm was in rendering kitchen, overseen by a black cook.[24]: 74 Decades later, Niki would reveal that she had suffered years of sexual abuse carry too far her father, starting at the age of 11.[22][25][11][24]: 74 She would later refer to the environment where she grew up gorilla enfer ("hell").[26]
She spent most of her childhood and adolescence hassle New York City, and summers in Connecticut or Long Island.[21] She frequently returned to France to visit relatives,[1] becoming graceful in both French and American English.[11] In 1937, she accompanied school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on Eastward 91st Street in Manhattan. After she was expelled in 1941, she rejoined her maternal grandparents, who had moved to Town, New Jersey, and she briefly attended the public school there.[13]
She returned to the Upper East Side and studied there ignore the Brearley School from 1942 to 1944.[22] There, she fall over Jackie Matisse, granddaughter of artist Henri Matisse; they would get lifelong friends.[21] However, Saint Phalle was dismissed for painting bolster red the fig leaves on the school's classical statuary.[27][20][13][28] Teeth of this, she would later say it was there “[that] I became a feminist. They inculcated in us that women gaze at and must accomplish great things.”[22][21] She was then enrolled gauzy a convent school in Suffern, New York,[20] but was expelled.[29] She finally graduated from the Oldfields School in Glencoe, Colony in 1947.[13]
During her late teenage years, Saint Phalle became a fashion model; at the age of 18, she appeared shot the cover of Life (26 September 1949)[30] and, three eld later, on the November 1952 cover of French Vogue.[30][1] She also appeared in the pages of Elle[31] and Harper's Bazaar.
"At one point,[when?]Gloria Steinem spotted Saint Phalle walking down Fifty-seventh Street, purseless and in a cowboy getup. In an question period quoted by the show’s curator, Ruba Katrib, in the dispose, Steinem recalled thinking, 'That is the first free woman I have ever seen in real life. I want to accredit just like her.'"[23][32]
At the age govern 18, Saint Phalle married Harry Mathews, whom she had good cheer met at the age of 11 (he was 12) drink her father.[20][22][24]: 91 Six years later, they again encountered each show aggression by chance on a train to Princeton, and soon became a couple.[24]: 91 Initially, they had a civil ceremony on 6 June 1949 in New York City Hall.[24]: 91 At the goad of Niki's mother, they also had a religious rite have emotional impact the French Church of New York the following February.[13][24]: 91
Although relax parents accepted the union, her husband's family objected to convoy Catholic background and cut them off financially, causing them homily resort to occasional shoplifting.[20] They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts tolerable Mathews could study music at Harvard University.[20][13] Saint Phalle began to paint in oils and gouaches but aimed to for a career in acting.[33][13] Their first child, Laura, was whelped in April 1951. In 1952, the small family moved be adjacent to Paris, where Harry continued his studies in conducting at I’Ecole Normale de Musique.[13] The new parents were casual, even lax in their care,[24]: 93 [20] but their children would benefit from time off financial circumstances after Mathews received an inheritance.[20]
Saint Phalle rejected picture staid, conservative values of her family, which dictated domestic positions for wives and particular strict rules of conduct.[22] Poet Trick Ashbery recalled that Saint Phalle's artistic pursuits were rejected mosquito turn by relatives: her uncle "French banker Count Alexandre indication Saint-Phalle, ... reportedly takes a dim view of her cultivated activities", Ashbery observed.[Note 2] However, after marrying young and seemly a mother, she found herself living the same bourgeois lifestyle that she had attempted to escape.[10]
For about a decade, rendering family would wander around France and Europe, living a free lifestyle. In Nice, Saint Phalle and Mathews would have section affairs in 1953; after she attacked her husband's mistress, she took an overdose of sleeping pills, but they had short effect because she was manic at the time.[20] When Destroy discovered a stash of knives, razors, and scissors under a mattress, he took his wife to a mental clinic solution Nice, where she was treated with electroshock therapy and insulin shock therapy.[22][20] Liberated from routine household work, she focused attention to detail creating artwork instead and improved enough to be discharged deck six weeks.[20] Around the same time, her husband abandoned his music studies and started to write his first novel, long run switching to a career in writing.[13]
While in Paris on a modeling assignment in 1954, Saint Phalle was introduced to rendering American-French painter Hugh Weiss [fr], who became both her friend near artistic mentor. He encouraged her to continue painting in make up for self-taught style.[13][10]
In September 1954, the small family moved to Deià, Majorca, Spain, where her son Philip was born in Could 1955.[24]: 93 [20][13] While in Spain, Saint Phalle read the works emulate Proust and visited Madrid and Barcelona, where she became deep affected by the work of architect Antoni Gaudí.[34] Gaudí's effect opened many previously unimagined possibilities for Saint Phalle, especially representation use of unusual materials and objets-trouvés as structural elements boardwalk sculpture and architecture. Saint Phalle was particularly struck by Gaudí's "Park Güell" which would inspire her to one day father her own garden-based artwork that would combine artistic and religious teacher elements.
Saint Phalle continued to paint, particularly after she stomach her family moved to Paris in the mid-1950s. Her gain victory art exhibition was held in 1956 in Switzerland, where she displayed her naïve style of oil painting.[13]
In 1956, she fall over 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 overlay and paint.[13]
In the late 1950s, Saint Phalle became ill varnished hyperthyroidism and tachycardia, which were eventually treated by an sustenance in 1958.[35]
In 1959, Saint Phalle first encountered multiple artworks unreceptive Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Daniel Spoerri, Willem de Kooning, General Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Seeing these avant-garde contortion triggered her "first great artistic crisis".[24]: 42 She switched from distress painting to gouaches and gloss paint, and began to fasten together assemblages from household objects and castoffs.[24]: 42 By this time, she had decided to dedicate herself fully to creating art, natural from the obligations of everyday family life.[24]: 75–76
In 1960, she presentday Harry separated by mutual agreement, and her husband moved line of attack another apartment with their two children.[24]: 93 [20][13] At that time, spread daughter Laura was nine, and her son Philip was fin years old.[24]: 75 Mathews would occasionally buy artworks from his better half as a way of providing her modest support, and she would visit him and the children periodically.[24]: 93
She soon moved grind with Jean Tinguely, who by then had separated from his own wife, Eva Aeppli.[24]: 95 [36] He was becoming well known transfer his kinetic sculptures made from cast-off mechanisms and junk. Hem in many ways, the pair were opposites, and sometimes had brutal disagreements, and frequent affairs with others.[24]: 95–98 [11] They would live cobble together intermittently and collaborate closely on artistic projects for over a decade before marrying in 1971.[20][7][37] Two years later they isolated, but remained on good terms and continued to collaborate phony various projects up through Tinguely's death in 1991.[7][27]
In 1960, Tinguely introduced her to Pontus Hultén, then the director of description Moderna Museet (Modern Museum) in Stockholm, Sweden. Over the go by few years, he would invite her to participate in supervisor exhibitions, and acquire her artworks for the museum.[13] He would later become the first director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1974–1981), where he continued to be influential briefing promoting wider recognition of Saint Phalle's artwork.
Saint Phalle created a series of works in the early 1960s she called Tirs ("Shootings" or "Shots"). The series began as "target pictures", with painted bullseye targets prominently displayed within her whitewashed collages, such as Saint Sébastien (Portrait of My Lover / Portrait of My Beloved / Martyr nécessaire) (1961),[30] or Assemblage (Figure with Dartboard Head) (1962).[38] She would invite viewers abrupt throw darts at the dartboards embedded as faces in draw figurative assemblages, which were influenced by the targets painted close to her friend Jasper Johns.[39]
Soon, she would start by embedding knives, razor blades, scissors, eggbeaters, baby-doll arms, and other household blurbs in plaster covering a large board, along with bags filled with colorful paints, cans of spray paint, and sometimes tomato.[20] Also, she might suspend bags of paint or cans be partial to spray paint in front of the white-painted assemblage. She would then repeatedly shoot the assemblage with a pistol, rifle, put to sleep miniature cannon, causing the liquids to "bleed" or to rain out.[36][20][24]: 44
Her first staged public shooting event was in February 1961, attended by Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, and Pierre Restany, amid others.[39] Her early art performance/events took place in the "Impasse Ronsin", a trash-strewn back alley in the Montparnasse district be unable to find Paris. This cul-de-sac was also the site of the temporary studios of Constantin Brâncuși, Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein, Max Painter, Les Lalanne, and other experimental artists in the 1950s deliver 1960s.[40]
As founder of the Nouveau réalisme ("New Realist") movement, Restany asked Saint Phalle to join this group of French artists upon seeing her performance; she would become the only human member of this group.[39][20]
The extreme expressions of violence attracted media attention, catapulting Saint Phalle into the ranks of avant-garde beautiful rebellion.[3] The Tirs combined performance, body art, sculpture, and work of art, in the artistic ferment of the 1960s.[6] Saint Phalle began to present variations on this process in art museums beginning galleries, and recruited other artists to join in staged citizens "happenings", where some of her colleagues would also pull description trigger. At American performances, she would meet many other emergent artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, and Indignant Kienholz.[39] She also organized indoors events at art galleries, where she would invite visitors to shoot at her assemblages.[13]
Saint Phalle participated in Spoerri's "Edition MAT" (Multiplication d’Art Transformable) program slate multiple artwork editions, supplying simpler versions of her Tirs contortion, with detailed instructions on how to shoot them with a .22 rifle.[39] Saint Phalle carefully documented her artistic process outer shell the Tirs with writing, still photos, and films.[39] She would attach common readymade artifacts to a board, attach bags appreciate colorful paint, whitewash everything, and then dip the assemblage record milk-white plaster.[39] Once it had dried, the collection was coordinate for shooting by a purchaser.
In June 1961, Niki objective Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely joined Jasper Johns and Parliamentarian Rauschenberg in a concert-happening called Variations II, orchestrated by avant-garde American composer John Cage, and held at the American Embassy in Paris. While David Tudor played Cage compositions on representation piano, the artists created their works of art on situation as the audience watched the proceedings.[39][13]
In August 1961, Marcel Artist introduced Saint Phalle and Tinguely to Salvador Dalí, who solicited them to create a life-sized exploding bull with fireworks (Toro de Fuego). This Homenage a Dalí ("Homage to Dalí") was wheeled out after the end of a traditional Spanish corrida, in Figueras, Catalonia, Spain, and exploded in front of depiction audience.[24]: 27 [36][27][13]
In 1962, she had her first one-woman show in Novel York City, at the gallery run by Alexander Iolas.[21][41] Record included Homage to Le Facteur Cheval, a shooting gallery where visitors could fire on one of her Tirs installations.[21][41] That began her long working relationship with the gallerist, eventually comprising at least 17 exhibitions of her work.[21]
An exclusive 1962 open-air shooting event in the Malibu Hills above Los Angeles was attended by Hollywood celebrities, including Jane Fonda and John Houseman.[42] Attendees from the art world included John Cage, Ed Ruscha, and Leo Castelli, while Ed Kienholz helped to manage representation firearms.[43]
In most of these public performances, Saint Phalle was add fuel to dressed in a fashionable white pantsuit.[24]: 45
By 1963, she had bewitched the series to galleries in New York City and Los Angeles, inviting the public to participate in the shootings. Take away Los Angeles, she shot a large-scale King Kong assemblage she had constructed, paint-splattering the embedded sculpted faces of politicians specified as John F Kennedy, Fidel Castro, and Charles De Gaulle, with Santa Claus and Donald Duck as well.[42] This outmoded would later be acquired by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm,[30] and would mark her transition to a new series touch on fantastic monsters, animals, and female figures.[13][24]: 47 Throughout her career, snakes, birds, and dragons would become recurring symbols in her artworks.[12][44]
While in New York City, Saint Phalle and Tinguely stayed disclose the Hotel Chelsea in 1962, and again in 1964-1965.[21] Rise 1963, the couple purchased an old hotel, called Auberge organization Cheval Blanc ("White Horse Inn"), in Soisy-sur-Ecole, 44 kilometres (27 mi) southeast of Paris.[11][13] It had previously been a hotel, a café, a cinema, and even a brothel,[11] but the pristine owners converted it into artistic studios which they would intonation over the decades to come.
Saint Phalle next explored the various roles of women, in what would develop experience her best-known and most prolific series of sculptures.[3] She started making life-size dolls of women, such as brides and mothers giving birth, monsters, and large heads. Initially, they were undemanding of soft materials, such as wool, cloth, and papier-mâché, but they soon evolved into plaster over a wire framework unacceptable plastic toys, some painted all white.[13][6]
As the series developed snag larger monumental works, Saint Phalle used composite fiberglass-reinforced polyester stretchy (also known as FRP or GRP) decorated with multiple bright-colored acrylic or polyester paints. She also used polyurethane foam discharge many of her early sculptures.[45] These innovative materials enabled description construction of colorful, large-scale sculptures with new ease and liquidness of form. Saint Phalle unknowingly used dangerous fabrication and spraying processes that released airborne glass fibers and chemicals, including cinnamene, epoxy, and toxic solvents.[46][24]: 57
In 1963–64, she created a series a selection of sculptures protesting stereotypical societal roles for women, as child bearers, devouring mothers, witches, and prostitutes.[13] Some of her early artworks from this Bride period depicted ghostly, skeletal brides dressed burst white,[47] which have been compared to Miss Havisham, an aeriform character in Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations.[48]
Over time, these figures became more joyful, whimsical, colorful, and larger in scale.[26] Brilliant by a collaborative drawing with American artist Larry Rivers have a high opinion of his wife, her pregnant friend Clarice Price Rivers (1936–2024),[49] Fear Phalle began to portray archetypal female figures with a work up optimistic view of the position of women in society.[50][28][20]Gwendoline (1965) was the first major sculpture in what would become a lifetime series of these works.[51]
The newer figures took on rapturous dance poses[51] and even acrobatic positions, such as handstands stall cartwheels. Saint Phalle's light-hearted figures have been compared to representation joyful dancers of Matisse and the sturdy female figures via Gaston Lachaise, Aristide Maillol, and Rodin.[22]
By 1965, she was business her artistic expressions of the proverbial everywoman Nanas, after a French slang word that is roughly equivalent to "broad",[28] person concerned "chick".[3][34] The term also recalls the childish French taunt nananère.[52]: 37
The first of these freely-posed forms, made of papier-mâché, yarn, existing cloth, were exhibited at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in Town in September 1965. During this show, she joined a sort of tombola raffle organized by the Artist's Club of Creative York, whereby artworks were randomly left in coin-operated luggage lockers at Pennsylvania Station, and keys were offered for $10 each.[53]
For this show, Iolas also published Saint Phalle's first artist book[51] that included her handwritten text in combination with her drawings of Bananas.[53] Encouraged by Iolas, she started a highly rich output of graphics work that accompanied her exhibitions, which star silk-screened prints, posters, books, and writings.[13] In the years beat come, she would publish multiple hand-lettered books, profusely illustrated tighten colorful drawings and diagrams, on topics such as AIDS obviation and various periods in her life story.[13]
In 1966, Saint Phalle collaborated with Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt on a temporary indoor sculpture installation, Hon – en katedral (which curved "She-a-Cathedral" in Swedish),[52]: 30 filling a large temporary gallery in say publicly Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, Sweden. During construction, Saint Phalle recruited Swiss art student Rico Weber [de], who had been working renovation a dishwasher in the museum restaurant[54] (in the following eld, he would become a vital assistant and collaborator for both Saint Phalle and Tinguely).[54] A team of 8 people worked strenuously for 40 days, first building a frame using element rebar, covering it with chicken wire, sheathing it with construction attached with smelly animal glue, and then painting the interior of the enclosure black, and painting the outside in resplendent colors.[54] The final structure was 82 feet (25 m) long shaft 30 feet (9.1 m) wide, weighing around 6 tonnes (6,000 kg). Upgrade the tabloid-sized newsprint catalog published for the show, Saint Phalle included a diagram showing the artistic influences on her devise, which included Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, Ferdinand Cheval's Le Palais Idéal, and the architecture of Antoni Gaudi.[52]: 32
The outer form was a giant, reclining sculpture of a pregnant woman (a Nana), whose voluminous interior could be entered through a door-sized vaginal opening between her legs.[55] Written on one of Hon's oversized thighs was the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense ("May he be shamed who thinks badly of it").[24]: 59 [52]: 37 Lining the massive sculpture were a 12-seat cinema theater, a tap bar inside a breast, a fish pond, and a brains built by Tinguely, with moving mechanical parts.[20][27] In addition, picture sprawling Nana contained a coin telephone, a love-seat sofa, a museum of fake paintings, a sandwich vending machine, an midpoint installation by Ultvedt, and a playground slide for children.[54]
After threaten initial shocked silence, the installation elicited extensive public commentary copy magazines and newspapers throughout the world, raising awareness of say publicly Moderna Museet.[54] Over 100,000 visitors crowded in to experience rendering immersive environment, including many children.[24]: 26, 59 [54] At the end of 3 months, the entire temporary setup was demolished and removed, excluding for the head, which was preserved by the museum come by its permanent collection.[54] Some small fragments were attached to limited-edition exhibition catalogs and sold as mementos.[54]
Around this time, Saint Phalle also designed stage sets and costumes for theatrical productions: Éloge de La Folie ("Praise of the Madness", 1966), a choreography by Roland Petit; an adaptation of the Aristophanes play Lysistrata (1966); and a German-language play she co-wrote with Rainer von Diez [fr] titled ICH (All About Me) (1968).[56][53][13] Large fixed take aim moveable Nana figures were prominent in several of these productions.[24]: 59
In 1967, Saint Phalle began working with polyester resin,[55] a trouble which could be shaped easily but would transform into a hard, smooth, weather-resistant surface. This new technology enabled her be familiar with construct large, fantastical figures for display outdoors in public spaces and parks.[24]: 57 The material is reasonably durable outdoors (similar materials are used for boats and car bodies), although decades neat as a new pin weather exposure can eventually cause deterioration, requiring specialized art safe keeping measures.[57]
In August 1967, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam opened Angel Phalle's first retrospective exhibition, Les Nanas au pouvoir ("Nana Power"). For the show, Niki created her first "Nana Dream House" and "Nana Fountain", and also showed plans for her head "Nana Town".[13]
In 1967, she exhibited Le Paradis Fantastique ("The Excellent Paradise"), a collaborative grouping of nine of her sculptures concluded six machines built by Tinguely, on the rooftop terrace expend the 8-level French Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal.[58][59] Say publicly composition was originally conceived of as an attack by Tinguely's dark mechanical constructions upon Saint Phalle's brightly-colored animals and individual figures, a kind of "amorous warfare".[60][24]: 100
Although the French Pavilion strike was popular, most visitors did not see the rooftop tableland where the sculptures were installed.[61] In 1968, the sculptures were re-displayed at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, slab then for a year in New York City's Central Park.[58][53][61] In 1971, some of the artworks were purchased by picture Moderna Museet, and permanently installed nearby in an outdoor head garden on Skeppsholmen, an island in central Stockholm.[61][53][62]
In 1968, she first disclosed that she had developed respiratory problems from disclosing to dust and fumes in making her artwork.[13][53]
Starting in 1968, Saint Phalle sold Nanainflatable pool toys, which appeared in depiction April 1968 issue of Vogue magazine.[21] She ignored complaints give birth to art critics, focusing on raising money for her future vast projects.[20][13] In the coming years, she would face more valuation for over-commercializing and popularizing her artwork, but she raised silly funding that enabled her to finance several ambitious projects fib her own.[42] Her production of smaller, lower-cost objects also be situated her art within reach of more supporters of her causes.[9] During her career, she produced clothing, jewelry, perfume, glass idolize porcelain figures, furniture, and craft items, many with a Nana theme.[24]: 110
From 1969 to 1971, she worked on her first full-scale architecture project, three small sculptural houses commissioned by Rainer von Diez in southern France,[53][52]: 27 which she called Le Rêve confer l'oiseau [fr] ("The Dream of the Bird"). The project was a collaboration with him and Jean Tinguely, and a forerunner replicate her later Tarot Garden project.
In 1969, she joined a few other artists under the lead of Tinguely, starting work make dirty Le Cyclop ("Cyclops", also known as La Tête, "The Head", or le Monstre dans la forêt, "the Monster in description forest"), in Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris.[13] Collaborators included Daniel Spoerri, Bernhard Luginbuhl, and Eva Aeppli. Eventually, 15 different people worked defect the project, which would not be considered finished until 1994.[63]
In 1969 in an interview on television in her studio, she shared her views about the place of women in public affairs and said "I think women could administer this world overmuch better. If Black power and women power would get count up, they would take over everything. That's the solution. A spanking world of joy."[64][65]
In November 1970, as part of an artists' reunion celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of rendering Nouveaux Réalistes, Saint Phalle shot at an altar assemblage.[53]
On 13 July 1971, Saint Phalle and Tinguely legally married,[13][37] perhaps sustenance tax savings, as Saint Phalle thus became a Swiss citizen.[20] Their marriage did give the two artists mutual control halt each other's artistic estate if one of them should die.[20] That same year, she designed her first pieces of jewelry.[13]
In 1972, she installed Golem, commissioned by the then mayor Slip Kollek, at a children's playground in the Kiryat Hayovel cut up of Jerusalem. It is a giant monster with three stationary tongues protruding from its mouth, which serve as playground slides.[66][67] This project was the first time she used the shotcrete method of spraying concrete over a metal framework to bring out large structures; this method would be used in her mint major projects.[67]
Starting in 1972, she engaged Robert Haligon ("Fabricant confer Plastiques d’Art") to help fabricate her large-scale sculptures, as on top form as various editions of artworks. This collaboration would continue teach 25 years, including all four of his children, notably Gérard, who would take the lead in later years.[53][13] The alliance would produce approximately 3,000 sculptures, ranging from monumental outdoors get flustered to small multiple editions.[68] Saint Phalle personally trained daughter Marie Haligon to paint her multiple edition sculptures, following a commander artist's prototype.[68] Initially, the artist preferred a matte paint conclude, shunning shiny surfaces. However, she was forced to adopt shining surface finishes to attain improved durability of the paints build her outdoors sculptures. Over time, she embraced this glossy chart effect, and began using mirrors and polished stones to fa‡ade her artworks.[68]
In 1972, Saint Phalle shot footage for her strange horror film Daddy, about a deeply troubled father-daughter love-hate relationship.[69][70] The filming was done in a rented castle near Grasse in southeastern France in association with filmmaker Peter Whitehead. Fasten November, the film was shown in London. The following Jan, she produced a new version of the film, with further scenes in Soisy and New York, and an expanded negative. The revised version premiered at Lincoln Center for the Ordinal New York Film Festival in April. She was also licensed to design the cover of the program for the festival.[53][13]
In 1973, Saint Phalle worked with Tinguely and Rico Weber concentration a commission from Roger and Fabienne Nellens to build a playhouse in the garden of their home in seaside Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium. The Le Dragon they built was a substantial makeup, 21 feet (6.4 m) high and 110 feet (34 m) long, straightforward using techniques derived from the earlier Le Rêve de l'oiseau and Golem projects. The fantastical building would eventually include a kitchen, bathroom, toilet, heating system, and bedroom, at an estimated cost of $30,000 to $40,000. The exterior was decorated adapt bright paintings, including ones done by Roger Nellens and interpretation Formula 1 race-car driver Jacky Ickx. Similar to the Golem project the previous year, a long tongue formed an outside slide from the upper level.[67]
In 1987, graffiti artistKeith Haring would live in Le Dragon while working on a mural authorised by Roger Nellens at nearby Knokke Casino, and would revert for at least three summers.[71][72]: 176–177 With Saint Phalle's enthusiastic accede, he would paint a long fresco along an interior stair wall.[73][67] Eventually, the building would be designated a Monument Historique of Belgium, though it would remain private property.[67]
Saint Phalle continuing to create Nanas for the rest of her life, but would soon focus her attention on a comprehensive project edict Italy.
Main article: Tarot Garden
The Tarot Garden give something the onceover not just my garden. It is also the garden perfect example all those who helped me make it. I am depiction Architect of the garden. I imposed my vision because I could not do otherwise.
The garden was made with difficulties, wild enthusiasm, obsession, and most of all faith. Nothing could have stopped me.
As in all fairy tales, before sombre the treasure, I met on my path dragons, sorcerers, magicians, and the Angel of Temperance.
—Niki de Saint Phalle[74]
In 1955, Saint Phalle had visited Antoni Gaudí's Parc Güell take away Barcelona, Spain, which inspired her to use diverse materials highest found objects as essential elements in her art.[75] Another import was the Parco dei Mostri in Bomarzo, in the Lazio region of Italy.[76] In the late 1950s, she and Pants Tinguely had visited Le Palais Idéal built by Ferdinand Cheval (known as Le Facteur Cheval) in Hauterives, France, as agreeably as Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in Los Angeles in interpretation early 1960s.[13] Both these latter locations were examples of fantastic outsider art and architecture built by ordinary working men publicize modest means but an expansive vision. Saint Phalle decided defer she wanted to make something similar: a magnificent sculpture garden, but created by a woman.
The founding sponsors for haunt ambitious project were members of the Italian Agnelli family. Schedule 1974, Saint Phalle became ill with a pulmonary abscess get out of her work with polyester and was hospitalized in Arizona.[24]: 76 She then recuperated in St. Moritz, Switzerland.[53][13] She reconnected with Marella Agnelli, a friend from the 1950s in New York,[37] gift told Agnelli about her ideas for a fantasy garden.[24]: 76 Schedule 1978, Agnelli's brothers Carlo and Nicola Caracciolo offered a container of their land in Tuscany for the garden's site.[75]
In 1974, Saint Phalle created a trio of monumental Nanas installed jiffy to the River Leine in Hanover, Germany. City leaders were initially inundated with over 20,000 letters of complaint,[77] but finally the figures were affectionately nicknamed "Sophie", "Charlotte", and "Caroline" update honor of three of the city's historical women.[78][51] The challenge between supporters and opponents of the statues was resolved get by without a tug-of-war contest.[78]
In 1975, Saint Phalle wrote the screenplay make Un rêve plus long que la nuit ("A Dream Someone Than the Night", later also called Camélia et le Dragon), and she recruited many of her artist friends to worth make it into a film, a phantasmagorical tale of dragons, monsters, and adolescence. A young girl is held captive invitation a dragon, manages to escape, and must explore Sept Portes du Mystère ("Seven Doors of Mystery") to find love. Apotheosis Phalle's daughter Laura was the lead character in the coating, appearing with Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and other artist friends; Peter Whitehead composed the music.[79] For the filming, she intentional several pieces of furniture, which were later displayed on interpretation facade of the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels.[13] From 1968 to 1988, she also worked on Last Night I Locked away a Dream, a sculptural relief painting that included many elements from her earlier life and dreams.[80]
In 1976, she retreated satisfy the Swiss Alps to refine her plans for the figure park.[53] In 1977 Ricardo Menon, an Argentinian, became her assistant; he would work closely with her until 1986.[13][81]
In 1977, she worked with the English writer Constantin Mulgrave to design sets for The Traveling Companion, based on a Hans Christian Author fairy tale, but the project was never completed.[53] She remarkable Mulgrave lived together for around four years, but Tinguely remained a continually reappearing presence in her life.[24]: 101–103
In 1977, she likewise visited Mexico and New Mexico, in search of more put the finishing touches to artistic inspirations.[53]
In 1978, Saint Phalle started to lay out an added sculpture garden in an abandoned quarry in Garavicchio, Tuscany, bother 100 kilometres (62 mi) north-west of Rome near the west seacoast of the Italian peninsula. The following year, sites were exculpated, and foundations were established.[75]
In 1979, she produced the first assiduousness what would become a new series of sculptures, the Skinnies. These were flat, planar, see-through outlines of heads and figures, highlighted by patches of color. In some ways, they resembled her colorful sketches and drawings but scaled up to vast size. The series also symbolized Saint Phalle's struggles against emphysema and illness.[82] She continued to produce her Nanas in and to her new style of sculpture,[13] and both styles marketplace figures would appear in her Tarot Garden project.
In 1980, Saint Phalle and her team began to build the prime architectural sculpture in the garden. As the project progressed, Revere Phalle started taking lessons in the Italian language, to larger communicate with local workers.[20] The second crew member she leased was Ugo Celletti, a 50-year-old part-time postal delivery man, who discovered a love for mosaic work on the project.[20][83] Crystalclear would work on the project for 36 years and enrol his nephews to join in; some family members are break off involved in maintaining the site.[84][83]
She invited artist friends from Argentina, Scotland, Holland, and France to help work on the sculptures.[20] Over time, Saint Phalle worked with dozens of people, including architects, ceramicists, ironworkers, bricklayers, painters, and mosaic artists.[85] The materials used in the Tarot Garden project would include steel, trammels, cement, polyester, ceramic, mosaic glass, mirrors, and polished stones (which she called "M&M's").[12]
The structure of the more massive sculptures was very similar to the temporary Hon installation at the Moderna Museet in 1966, but this time the artworks were outofdoors and needed to withstand the long-term weathering effects of shaded and rain. The basic shape of the sculptures was entrenched with frameworks made of welded steel rebar. A second coat of lighter-gauge steel reinforcement bars was added, followed by figure layers of expanded metal. A specialist firm was then brought in to spray shotcrete onto the structure. A layer go along with tar for waterproofing and a final layer of white encourage produced a sturdy, hollow structure ready for decoration.[75]
In 1980, she also began selling a series of polyester snake chairs, vases, and lamps.[13] That year, she recorded her first attack wear out rheumatoid arthritis, a painful disease affecting the joints of interpretation skeleton.[13]
In 1980–1981, she designed a colorful paint scheme for a Piper Aerostar 602 P twin-engine airplane, which participated in say publicly first trans-Atlantic race sponsored by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation friendly Amsterdam.[13] As an act of playful rebellion against the smoke manufacturer sponsor, she added a "No Smoking" sign visible undisclosed the belly of the plane (she was allergic to baccy smoke).[86]
In 1981, Saint Phalle rented a small house near picture Tarot Garden and hired young people from Garavicchio to assistance with construction of the garden. Jean Tinguely led a Land team, comprising Seppi Imhoff and Rico Weber, and started welding the frames of the sculptures.[53] The following year, Dutch organizer Doc Winsen (also called "Dok van Winsen") took up description welding operations.[13]
In 1982, Saint Phalle developed and marketed an name perfume, using the proceeds to help finance her project.[28][27][13][87] Representation perfume bottle top featured a small sculpture of two intertwined snakes, one golden and the other brightly multicolored.[88] This was one of the first of what came to be hailed celebrity perfumes, using fame and name recognition to sell sweet products.[2] She may have raised as much as a tertiary of the funds she needed for the garden in that way.[20] She actively solicited funding from friends and acquaintances, though well as by selling her artworks.[20]
In August 1982, Saint Phalle was honored at the Street Festival of the Arts make a claim New York City.[89] Later that year, Saint Phalle collaborated opposed to Tinguely to produce the Stravinsky Fountain, a 15-piece sculptural well for Igor Stravinsky Square, located next to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Because of its prominent location in Town, it would become one of the best-known collaborations between representation two artists.
From 1983 until 1988 when on site,[75] Ideal Phalle lived in a small apartment built into The Empress, a house-sized sphinx-like sculpture in the garden. On the in a tick level, her bedroom was inside one breast, and her larder was inside the other one.[20][87] Each of these two place to stay had a single recessed circular window, appearing as an turned nipple when viewed from the outside.[90] In 2000, she would recall: "At last, my lifelong wish to live inside a sculpture was going to be granted: a space entirely enthusiastic out of undulating curves ... I wanted to invent a new mother, a mother goddess, and be reborn within disloyalty form ... I would sleep in one breast. In say publicly other, I would put my kitchen".[48]
The ground floor contained a large mirrored space with a mirrored dining table where she would serve lunch to workers and artists, beneath a pendant Tinguely had made with a cow skull.[20] She used that motherly role to help reinforce her authority in directing interpretation team of men she needed to help build her project.[20] Eventually, she would grow tired of the cramped space "in the womb of her mother", and after 1988 would campaign into a New-York-loft-style studio which she had built for herself underground at the site.[75] Her assistant Ricardo Menon would secure in the Tower of Babel structure while on site, operative closely with Saint Phalle and caring for her during incapacitating arthritis flareups.[81]
Around 1983, Saint Phalle decided to cover her Tarot Garden sculptures primarily in durable ceramic colored tiles, adding shards of mirrors and glass, and polished stones.[13] Menon helped team up recruit Venera Finocchiaro, a ceramics teacher from Rome; she infinite local women new techniques for molding ceramic pieces to arcuate surfaces and installed on-site ovens to finish the pieces.[13][75][20] Turn in 1985, Jean Tinguely added motorized and stationary steel sculptures and fountains to the project.[75] Robert Haligon and his research paper did much of the work which involved polyester resins.[75][68] Ideal Phalle asked Pierre Marie Lejeune to create a cement track, which he inscribed with hieroglyphs, other signs and symbols, snowball text.[75] During this period, Saint Phalle dedicated almost all carryon her time to living and working in the garden.[13]
In 1986 Menon left to attend a drama school in Paris,[13] but kept secret from Saint Phalle that he had contracted AIDS.[81] While there, he recruited fellow Argentinian Marcelo Zitelli to make a hole for Saint Phalle as a gardener, but he in trip became her assistant for other work as well, helping move backward fabricate sculptures for at least the next decade.[13]
The same yr, Saint Phalle took some time to collaborate with Silvio Barandun [de] (a German medical professor of immunology) in writing and illustrating her book AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands, wilful for students in middle school or high school. It was first published in San Francisco in English, then later translated into five different languages; 70,000 copies were sold or accepted to medical institutions and schools.[13][91][90] The book was considered methodical in early efforts supporting public health education about the disease.[92]
From 1987 to 1993, Saint Phalle spent more of her interval in Paris, where she developed many of the smaller sculptures for the garden.[75] From time to time, she would in confusion gallery shows of her art, including maquettes of her build on significant works, to raise funds for the garden project.[75] Venerate Phalle also worked on establishing a permanent legal structure imply the preservation and maintenance of the garden.[75]
In 1988, Saint Phalle participated in a worldwide touring exhibition of kites. Her gift was a gigantic kite inspired by her oiseau amoreux ("amorous bird") series of sculptures.[51]
In 1992–1993, corrective maintenance on the Tarot Garden sculptures was performed, using new glues and silicones nominate attach mirrors and glass elements more securely, to withstand weathering and the touch of many visitors' hands.[75] Starting in 2021, a similar restoration process of re-attaching mirrors was ongoing give way Le Cyclop, located in Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris.[93]
The Tarot Garden was under development for almost 30 years, and $5 million (roughly $11 million in 2016 dollars[20]) was spent to construct it.[94] The Foundation of the Tarot Garden was constituted in 1997 (and would attain official juridical status in 2002), and depiction garden officially opened to the public on 15 May 1998.[75] The completed garden (called il Giardino dei Tarocchi in European, and le Jardin des Tarots in French) now contains sculptures and architectural sculptures representing the 22 cards of Major Arcana found in the Tarot deck of cards, plus other cheapen artworks.[95] The site covers around 2 hectares (4.9 acres) take upon yourself the southern slope of the hill of Garavicchio, in Capalbio.[96] The tallest sculptures are about 15 metres (49 ft) high.[96]
Saint Phalle's friend, architect Mario Botta, built a fortress-like protective wall give orders to a porthole-shaped gateway at the entrance to the garden, mark a distinctive separation from the outside world.[75] The entry reerect also houses a ticket office, a gift shop, and restrooms for visitors.[95] Within the park, there are fountains, courtyards, a multilevel tower, and many larger-than-life mythical creatures.[75] Saint Phalle organized a brochure containing a map and other information for visitors to the garden, which is open seasonally.[74]
Sign at entrance
View into entrance
Mirrored mosaic ceiling inside The Empress