Happy Birthday Niki de Saint Phalle
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The path to becoming an artist was not an easy one for Catherine Marie-Agn’s Fal de Saint Phalle. She had many personal obstacles to overcome, but she was able to do this and make a personal statement with her artwork that is a lasting tribute. She has been called an Outsider Artist, because she didn’t receive formal training.
The term Outsider Art may no longer be relevant because it implies an ‘insider art,’ that everyone agrees on, something that is less true now than at another time.Niki de Saint Phalle was self educated but she also learned from sophisticated artists she associated with. She met many of the Surrealists in Paris, such as Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, and Salvador Dali. She came to know the American painter, Hugh Weiss, who encouraged her personal style of painting. Her marriage to the talented Swiss artist, Jean Tinguely (pictured below right), was of great importance to her development. It would be difficult to see her as an Outsider Artist, and more accurately she would be described as a Symbolist and Surrealist, with Pop Art influence.
Niki de Saint Phalle was an artist ahead of her time and her artwork will gain in stature with time. She took on subjects about women before women dared to do so. Her Nanas were images of giant women, and this scared people in the 1960s; they looked too powerful, too sexual, and out of control. Niki de Saint Phalle was also revolutionary for her ‘Shooting Paintings.’ These were conceptual in design and dealt with the subject of aggression, in particular, aggression of the father. The concepts she brought up in the 1960s are vital today and have led to further investigation by young artists.
Niki de Saint Phalle was born in 1930, the second of five children in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris. Her parents were the French banker Andre Marie Comte de Saint Phalle and his wife Jeanne Jacqueline, n’e Harper. The same year she was born, Nikki’s father lost his entire fortune in the stock market and Nikki and her brother were sent to live with their grandparents for three years. Nikki de Saint Phalle suffered at least two
Shooting a Painting major tragedies in childhood, the first was being uprooted from her mother for the first three years of life. The second, according to her later writings, was being raped by her father at a young age.
In 1933, the family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, and later to New York where Nikki attended convent school.
When she was 18 years old, she married Harry Mathews and moves with him to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While her husband studied music at Harvard University, Niki began to paint and experiment with various materials. In addition to this, from 1948 until about 1955, she also worked as a fashion model for “Vogue”, “Life”, “Harper’s Bazaar”, “Elle” and other French and American magazines.
In 1951, her daughter Laura was born. A few years later, the family moved to Paris, where Niki studied theatre science. Her husband continued his music studies and later becomes a writer. In 1953, Niki suffered from a nervous breakdown in Nice and was treated in a hospital – with electroshocks and psychiatric drugs. This personal catastrophe was an occasion for Niki to rethink her life’s plans and liberate herself.
In Paris, Niki met not only the Swiss artist couple Eva Aeppli and Jean Tinguely, but also the American painter Hugh Weiss, who encouraged her to remain true to her autodidactic painting style. Niki moved with her family to Deya, Majorca, where her son Philip was born in 1955. In 1956, she had her first solo exhibition in St. Gallen with plaster reliefs and material assemblages. She divorced Harry Mathews in 1960.
Niki lived and worked from this time on together with Jean Tinguely. Tinguely and Saint Phalle were married in 1971 and separated only two short years later in 1973. The couple never divorced but remained good friends and collaborated on many sculpture projects. Saint Phalle has described her husband as “my love, my work partner and also my rival.” Though the couple collaborated together she felt in competition with him for most of her career.
In Paris in 1962 de Saint Phalle exhibited ten works at a one-woman exhibition at Galerie Rive Droite. Among the visitors was Alexander Iolas, who invited Niki to exhibit in New York the following October. He supported her financially for many years and organized numerous exhibitions for her, even though few of the exhibits sold much. It was Iolas who introduced her to the Surrealist painters, Victor Brauner, Max Ernst and Rene Magritte. Niki de Saint Phalle took part in a large-scale installation at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, in which Robert Rauschenberg, Martial Raysse, Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt were also involved.
In 1965, the first “Nanas” were exhibited in the Galerie Iolas in Paris. They were in no way seen by everyone as cheerful. On the contrary, critics labeled the seemingly lively and wildly dancing feminine figures with attributes such as “aggressive”, “satirical” and “feminist”. The “Giant Nana” realized in Stockholm one year later was even described as the “largest whore in the world”. The work – titled “Hon – en katedral” (She – A Cathedral) – lied there with thighs spread open, offering visitors entry through her vagina.
In 1967 In August, Niki de Saint Phalle’s first retrospective was held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, under the title Les Nanas au pouvoi. For this exhibition she created her first Nana Dream House and her first Nana Fountain and planed her first Nana town.
In spite of all the critics and skeptics, Niki de Saint Phalle became triumphantly successful with her controversial art. Her collaboration in the 1980s with the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely on a landmark fountain for the plaza of the Centre Pompidou in Paris is world renowned. The voluptuous Nanas are on display in numerous cities in France, Germany, Israel, Italy, and Japan. The marketing success of Niki de Saint Phalle perfume allowed the artist to fulfill a dream to create a park in northern Italy full of giant sculptures based on Tarot cards. In the 1990s de Saint Phalle worked in Hanover on the development of this unusual, spectacular garden. She was called the Honored Citizen of Hanover, and was working on a large grotto for her garden when she died in May, 2002.
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