Niki de Saint Phalle

Galeries nationales du Grand Palais

December 19, 2014 Februray 2, 2015

Published at Hyperallergic.com here

http://hyperallergic.com/178128/falling-for-niki-de-saint-phalle/

I have never particularly admired French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalles overly

familiar (and overly obvious) Nanas (French slang for broads) - the gaudy, plump,

joyous everywoman figures that made the artists case for female affirmation. Nor am I a

huge fan of the Stravinsky Fountain at Centre Pompidou, her collaboration with Jean

Tinguely. So I was somewhat reluctant to hit the Grand Palais to see her retrospective.

That aside, I was very satisfied that I did, as I was casually bowled over with the intensity

of her total oeuvre, discovering the womans full spectrum as an artist. And for me, she is

more powerful than her creation of the mighty dancing archetypal female figure, even

one developed in relation to the position of women in society at the time. Indeed, her solo

retrospective show, and that of Sonia Delaunay at the Muse d'art moderne, mark a fairly

strong year for woman artists in Paris this season, albeit women who have already passed

away from us.

Niki de Saint Phalle modeling on the cover of Life Magazine (1949)

Born Catherine Marie-Agns Fal de Saint Phalle, child of an American mother (Jeanne

Jacqueline Harper) and the Count Andr-Marie Fal de Saint Phalle (a ruined banker)

Saint Phalle grew up in America and began her rather saucy life there. In the show, Saint

Phalle is introduced first as a very pretty and slender professional fashion model,

appearing in the late 40s on the covers of Life Magazine and French Vogue. At eighteen,

she elopes with the wonderful writer Harry Mathews, soon to be know for his association

with Oulipo and the Locus Solus journal (so named after the novel Locus Solus by

Raymond Roussel). They move to Paris in the mid-1950s where Saint Phalle pursues a

painting career, with her first solo exhibit in 1956.

I was particularly taken in with this early work, such as Pink Nude in Landscape (1956-

58), with its cheeky Pollock-meets-Dubuffet painting style, full of both visual noise and

charm.

Pink Nude in Landscape (1956-58)

In the early 60s she is attracted to assemblage as discovered in the work of RobertRauschenberg and Larry Rivers, and incorporates found objects into her work. Such as inSaint Sbastien (Portrait of My Lover / Portrait of My Beloved / Martyr ncessaire)(1961). At this point I began softly to concentrate on the theoretical qualities of hermultiplicitious lyricism.

Saint Sbastien (Portrait of My Lover / Portrait of My Beloved / Martyr ncessaire)

(1961) 72x55x7 cm

Photograph by Friedrich Rauch: Niki de Saint Phalle, Tir Gambrinus, at galerie Becker,

Munich (1963)

Tir (1961), 175x80 cm, collection Centre Pompidou

Heads of State (Study for King Kong) Printemps (1963) detail

King Kong (1963) collection of Modern Museet, Stockholm (gift of the artist in1972)

"Tir" (1962-72)

"Autel du Chat Mort" (1963)

This work was followed by the radical breakout, creative-destructive "Shooting

Paintings" of the early 60s, (halfway between performance, sculpture and painting) such

as Tir (Firing) (1961) and King Kong (1963). With this vanguard work she joins the

Nouveau ralisme movement along with Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein, Raymond Hains and

Csar.

Freeing the viewer from patriarchal dominant reason, this sexually and religiously

charged work (full of psychic destruction) was done by embedding polythene bags of

paints were into relief human forms and assemblaged toys that are covered in several

layers of white plaster painted stark white. She thus creates something like a hymen that

she herself will pierce with the shots from a .22 rifle, releasing flows and bursts of colors

from the bags of paint - completing the painting. This period is amply illustrated with

many films and interviews shown side-by-side with the paintings. I was fascinated to see

her murder paintings, make them bleed colors, and come back to a better life.

"Cheval et la Marie" (1964)

"hon-en katedral" (1966) Moderna Museet, Stockholm

This work led to a series of romantic freestanding assemblage sculptures, such as

"Cheval et la Marie" (1964), where my conflicting ideas and intellectual positions about

marriage were mitigated by amusement. In 1966, Saint Phalle collaborated with fellow

artist Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt on a large-scale vagina-themed sculpture

installation called "hon-en katedral" (she-a cathedral) for Moderna Museet, Stockholm; a

giant, reclining Nana whose internal environment was entered from between her legs.

This piece elicited massive press coverage, worldwide. The provocative, feminist,

psychological interpretations are too tempting to be avoided and I admit that watching a

film on it tickled the clownish Duchampian in me. This work became the model for her

highly complex and detailed Tarot Garden (1998), a huge sculpture park in Tuscany on

which she worked for nearly two decades (influenced by Gaud's Parc Gell in

Barcelona, Parco dei Mostri in Bomarzo, Palais Idal by Ferdinand Cheval and Watts

Towers by Simon Rodia). Her lovely idealism is realized here, offering fluid visual

evidence of an a-rational visual a-logic based in the theoretical constructs of the feminine.

Tarot Garden (1998)

"Skull (Meditation Room)" (1990)

I was even more impressed with Saint Phalles keen satirical eye for patriarchal cant that

she tied to an intense alertness and a heightened capacity to sympathize with the

downtrodden. This she displayed in her early political activism concerning resistance to

the war in Algeria, US segregationists, the war in Vietnam, and the AIDS crisis.

Undeniably, I was moved by her immersive chamber that was simply titled "Skull

(Meditation Room)" (1990); an AIDS-related work of baffling trepidation, lamentation

and mourning. It is an artwork of tragic cries and private perturbations.

All told, I was seduced by her interdisciplinary works overall rebellious grace. What is

today particularly interesting about her art, is its empowerment tied to inventive myth.

Her pleasantly nudging work contains a poetic, passionate, and political meaning that

does not rely on a logic or language of appropriation. It is based neither in reductive

purism nor fragmentary isolation. And it raises the contemporary question of not whether

we will become non-hierarchical post-feminists, but, what kind of heterogeneous post-

feminists do we prefer to be.

Joseph Nechvatal