Nikki de St Phalle 1930 —2002
Biography
NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE (1930- 2002)
The "magic reality" of Saint Phalle's sculpture relates to the visual vitality and affirmation of spirit found in Outsider Art. Throughout her work, no matter how extreme the image, there is an underlying innocence that has the power to gladden the heart and enchant the eye. Like Saint Phalle's well-known female figures, the Nanas, her art resonates with a "joyful noise."
Niki de Saint Phalle was a citizen of the world: she was born near Paris, raised in New York, traveled in Europe and later worked in Switzerland, France, Israel, Italy, and finally California.
Her passionately lived life provides the raw material for her works. Driven in part by aggressiveness, in part by the joy of life and love, and infused with humor and an enormous capacity for work, de Saint Phalle has been able to make the wounds of life productive for her art.
After her childhood in an upper middle-class family and a strict Catholic education in an American convent-school, among other schools she attended, Niki eloped at eighteen with a young American, Harry Mathews, and had two children. Following a psychological breakdown she used painting as therapy while still in the mental hospital—her early art was thus the attempt of an autodidact to transform her dreams and terrors into images.
In 1955 she met the Swiss metal sculptor Jean Tinguely—“He was the person I was destined to meet”—and entered into a working and life partnership with him. The idea of the “shooting paintings” evolved: white sculptures and assemblages with enclosed containers of paint which would be shot at, thus releasing aggression and causing the paint to pour over the image. The “shooting paintings” attracted attention and were de Saint Phalle’s first success. She said of them: “In 1961 I shot at Papa, at all men, at important men, fat men, men, my brother, society, the church, the convent, school, my family, my mother….” The campaign of liberation carried out in the “shooting paintings” reached its conclusion with the monumental image King Kong. Now Niki de Saint Phalle could turn to a new topic, women’s roles, which she explored in an unusual way from 1962 on. She created reliefs and assemblages of female figures such as The Red Witch, The Bride, The Pink Birth, and The Monster.
And then there were the Nanas, which made their creator famous. The first figures, still made of wire and fabric, were exhibited in Paris in 1964. In 1966 the first large project followed in Stockholm’s Moderna Museet: a 27-meter-long reclining female figure which could be walked through, entering via the vagina. She was the original mother of all the Nanas to follow; monstrous, serenely happy, brightly painted, provocative and outrageous, the Nanas would soon captivate the world. With her motto “Power to the Nanas!” Niki de St. Phalle connected with ideas of the women’s movement which were in the air at the time. The Nanas, at first created as larger-than-life polyester figures, soon became a symbol of female strength and self-confidence in whatever form they appeared—as jewelry, perfume bottles, or on posters.
Tinguely was Niki’s congenial adviser and helper in all following major projects, such as Paradis fantastique for the 1967 Expo in Montreal or the Golem, a playground for children in Jerusalem. Among their best-known collaborative works was the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, in which St. Phalle’s colorful polyester figures combine marvellously with Tinguely’s kinetic metal objects.
In the 70’s several new series were developed—the Giant Heads, the Couples, the Devouring Mothers, two films, a theater piece, and finally the Skinnies—transparent sculptures which also re-appear in her Tarot Garden in south Tuscany. She began this, her largest and most comprehensive project at the end of the 1970’s. Inspired by the fantastic baroque gardens of Tuscany (Bomarzo and Villa d’Este) and the figures of the tarot, St. Phalle worked with Tinguely and many assistants for fifteen years to create a park landscape full of monumental sculptures which could be entered and inhabited. While the figures represent tarot motifs—the tower, the ruler, death—she uses mosaic stones in the tradition of old Italian artisans for the colorful glowing and reflective surfaces. In 1996 the garden was first opened to the public and has since become a great tourist attraction in the region.
While the Tarot Garden was still being completed, Niki de St. Phalle turned to a number of smaller, more personal projects. She illustrated with her cheerfully colorful, almost naïve-seeming drawings a very seriously intended educational book, AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands, after she had lost one of her closest friends and co-workers. And she finally wrote her book My Secret, in which she unsparingly comes to terms with the traumatic experience of her childhood, sexual abuse at the hands of her father.
Following her doctor’s advice St. Phalle moved in 1994 to the milder climate of California. Her health, damaged by many years of dangerous polyester fumes, was now at stake.
In the summer of 2000 Niki de Saint Phalle gave the city of Hanover a magnificent gift: she presented the Sprengel Museum with 300 of her works and re-established at the same time an old connection. For in 1969 she had held one of her first large one-woman shows in Hanover, and in 1974 the city had bought three of her glowingly colorful, voluminous female figures and positioned the Nanas prominently on the bank of the Leine, where they have since become a familiar trademark of Hanover.
Two years later she died in San Diego of emphysema. She dedicated her last great series to her companion Tinguely, who had died in 1991. The Exploding Pictures disintegrate, controlled by photoelectric cells, into their separate parts and then recombine, a playful hommage to Tinguely’s kinetic sculptures.
In 2008, supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, Nike de Saint Phalle’s exhibition at the Tate Liverpool included the acclaimed Shooting Pictures 1961, and large sculptural works. The Tate Liverpool, described Saint Phalle as “Beautiful, flamboyant, daring, provocative and fiercely independent, she emerged in the 1960s as a powerful and original figure in the highly masculine international arts world.”
An important source for modern and contemporary American & European Art in East Hampton, New York & worldwide, Vered Gallery's spectacular wide-ranging inventory consists of unique paintings, drawings, large & small scale sculpture, monotypes, prints and photographs by Ansel Adams, Milton Avery, Richard Avedon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Romare Bearden, Fernando Botero, Cartier-Bresson, Marc Chagall, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Willem De Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, David Hockney, Winslow Homer, Wolf Kahn, Jeff Koons, Fernand Leger, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Thomas Moran, Henry Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Cindy Sherman, Charles Sheeler, Bert Stern, Alfred Stieglitz, Andy Warhol, Carleton E Watkins, Tom Wesselmann and Andrew Wyeth.
To bookmark Vered Gallery website: http://www.veredart.com
View synoptic biography below.
Literature
De Saint Phalle, Niki. 1993. Tableaux Éclatés. Paris. Éditions de la Difference.
De Saint Phalle, Niki. 1994. Mon Secret. Paris. Éditions de la Difference.
Reinhardt, Brigitte. Hg. 1999. Niki de Saint Phalle: Liebe, Protest, Phantasie. Ausstellungskatalog Ulm, Ludwigshafen, Emden.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2010 National Museum of Women in the Arts 28 April - October 2010 Washington, D.C.
2003 Niki de Saint Phalle, 1930-2002, Her last images, Herbert Palmer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1999 Traces, Galerie JGM Paris
1997 Art/Fashion, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, NY
1997 Made in France, Musée National d'Art Modern, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France
1993 Niki de Saint Phalle: L'invitation au muse, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France
1990 Art in Europe and America: The 1950's and 1960's, Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
1988 Ambiente Italia, XLIII Esposizione Internazionale d'arts: La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy
1987 Fantastic Vision: Works by Niki de Saint Phalle, Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, Roslyn, NY
1985 Nouveau Réalsime and Pop Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL
1980 American Sculpture: Gifts of Howard and Jean Lipman, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
1977 3 Collections: Grenoble-Marseille-Saint-Étienne, L'Avant-Garde 1960-1976, Musée Cantini, Marseilles
1977 Paris-New York: Un Album, Musé National de'Art Moderne, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, France
1974 Niki de Saint Phalle: Projets et realizations d'architecture, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam
1970-71 10th Anniversary of the Nouveaux Réalistes, Rotonda della Besana, Milan, Italy
1969 Contemporary American Sculpture Selection 2, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
1968 Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
1966 Four European Artist and the Figure, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
1965 Niki de Saint Phalle, Gallery Alexandre Iolas, New York, NY
1964 Niki de Saint Phalle, The Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1964 Niki de Saint Phalle: You are my Dragon, Hanover Gallery, London, England
1961 Feu a Volonté, Galerie J., Paris, France
1961 Niki de Saint-Phalle, Kopcke Gallery, Copenhagen
1956 Niki Mathews New York Gemalde Gouachen, Galerie Restaurant Gotthard, St. Gallen, Switerland
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Niki Museum, Nasu, Japan
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Musée d'Art et d'Industrie, Saint-Etienne, France
Pinacoteca do Estado, Sao Paulo, Brazil
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX
Neuberger Museum, State University of New York at Purchase, Purchase, NY
New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA
California State University Library, CA
The Hakone Open Air Museum, Japan
Schneider Children's Hospital, Long Island Jewish Medican Center, New Hyde Park, Long Island, NY
ALCOA, Pittsburgh, PA
Musée d'Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris, France
Virland, Foundation, New Orleans, LA
The Art Museum, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
Mingei International Museum, San Diego, CA
Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, France
The Chase Manhattan Bank, New York, NY
San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, CA
Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
Stuart Collection of Sculpture at University of California San Diego, CA
Art Gallery of Western Australia
Kunserhaus, Vienna, Austria
Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Banque Lambert, Brussles, Belgium
Tate Gallery, London, England
Victoria Albert Museum, London, England
Marie-Louise and Gunnat Didrikson Foundation, Helsinki, Finland
Musée d'Art Contemproain, Dunkerque, France
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, France
Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Holland
Robert B. Mayer Memorial Loan Collection, Chicago, IL
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland
Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland
Iwaki Street Art Museum, Japan
The Menill Collection, Houston, TX
National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
Setagaya Art Museum, Japan
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
Malmo Konsthall, Sweden
On 17 November 2000 Niki became an honorary citizen of Hannover, Germany, and donated 300 pieces of her artwork to the Sprengel Museum.
Many of Niki de Saint Phalle's sculptures are large and some of them are exhibited in public places, including:
Stravinsky Fountain (or Fontaine des automates) near the Centre Pompidou, Paris (1982)-also featuring works of Jean Tinguely
- La fountaine Château-Chinon, at Château-Chinon, Nièvre. Collaboration with Jean Tinguely
- L'Ange Protecteur in the Hall of the Zürich Train Station
- Nanas, along the Leibnizufer in Hannover (1974).
- Queen Califia's Magic Circle, a sculpture garden in Kit Carson Park, Escondido, California [2]
- Sun God (1983), a fanciful winged creature next to the Faculty Club on the campus of the University of California, San Diego as a part of the Stuart Collection of public art.
- La Lune, A sculpture located inside the Brea Mall in Brea, California.
- Coming Together, San Diego convention center[3]
- Grotto at the Royal Herrenhäuser Gardens in Hannover, Germany [4]
- Cyclop in Milly-La-Forêt, France-collaborative monumental sculpture with Jean Tinguely, a.o. [5]
- Golem in Jerusalem[6]
- Noah's Ark collaborative sculpture park with Swiss architect Mario Botta in Jerusalem[7]
- Lebensretter-Brunnen / Lifesaver Fountain in Duisburg, Germany
- l'Oiseau de Feu Sur l'Arch / Firebird (literally, "Bird of Fire on an Arch"), in Bechtler Plaza in Charlotte, North Carolina. [1]
MUSEUMS COLLECTIONS
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
(Zoomify viewer requires Java in order to view images)
Niki Museum, Nasu
Museum in Japan dedicated to the work of Niki de Saint Phalle
Queen Califia's Magical Circle Garden, Escondido, California
The only sculpture garden in America created by Niki de Saint Phalle
Stuart Collection of Sculpture at the University of California
Sun God (with photos showing the sculpture's proposal, construction and installation)
Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK
Nana Danseuse, 1972
Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland
Serpent Goddess
Dublin City Gallery | The Hugh Lane, Dublin, Ireland
Kunsthalle Mannheim, Germany (in German)
MUMOK - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna
(You need to click the "right" arrow four times)
Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice (mostly in French)
22 works on three pages
San Diego Museum of Art, California
Requires Flash: Click on "Artist Index", then on "S"
Tate Gallery, London, UK
Walker Art Center, Minnesota
Literature
- Niki de Saint Phalle, Pontus Hultén, ISBN 3-7757-0582-1. Published in connection with an exhibition in Bonn
- Traces: An Autobiography Remembering 1930 - 1949, Niki de Saint Phalle, ISBN 2-940033-43-9
- Harry & Me. The Family Years, Niki de Saint Phalle, ISBN 371651442X
- Niki de Saint Phalle: Catalogue Raisonné: 1949 - 2000, Janica Parente a.o., ISBN 2-940033-48-X
- Niki De Saint Phalle: Monographie/Monograph, Michel de Grece a.o., ISBN 2-940033-63-3
- Niki's World: Niki De Saint Phalle , Ulrich Krempel, ISBN 3-7913-3068-3
- Niki de Saint Phalle. My art, my dreams, Carla Schultz-Hoffmann (Editor), ISBN 3-7913-2876-X
- AIDS: You can't catch it holding hands, Niki de Saint Phalle, ISBN 0-932499-52-X
- Niki de Saint Phalle: Insider-Outsider. World Inspired Art, Niki de Saint Phalle, Martha Longenecker (Editor), ISBN 0-914155-10-5
- Niki De Saint Phalle: The Tarot Garden, Anna Mazzanti, ISBN 88-8158-167-1
- Niki de Saint Phalle: La Grotte, ISBN 3-7757-1276-3
- Jo Applin, "Alberto Burri and Niki de Saint Phalle: Relief Sculpture and Violence in the Sixties', Source: Notes in the History of Art, Winter 2008
Film
- Daddy, 1973, written and directed by de Saint Phalle and Peter Lorrimer Whitehead.
- Un rêve plus long que la nuit, 1971, written and directed by de Saint Phalle.
- Who is the monster - You or me?, 1995, by Peter Schamoni in collaboration with de Saint Phalle.
Chronology
1930
Born Catherine Marie-Agnes Fal de Saint Phalle at Neuilly-sur-Seine, second of five children of Jeanne Jacqueline, nee Harper and Andre Marie de Saint Phalle, a banker
1930-33
Her father looses all his money in the stock market crash of 1929. She and elder brother are separated from parents; they are sent to live with paternal grandparents in the Nievre area of France for the next three years.
1933
Family reunited in Greenwich, Connecticut. Summers are spent in France with American maternal grandfather Donald Harper at his chateau "Filerval" with gardens designed by Le Notre. Experience of two ways of life influence her thinking.
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