Niki de Saint Phalle, Sculptor, 71
DGH
Niki de Saint Phalle, a Franco-American artist internationally known for
her colorful, monumental, cartoonlike sculptures and environments, died
on Tuesday, May 21, 2002, in San Diego, California, at the age of 71,
from pulmonary failure after an illness of several months.
A heroine to feminism before the modern movement even emerged, Ms. de
Saint Phalle first made her mark in Paris in the early 60's when she was
associated with the Nouveaux Réalistes, a group of avant-gardists that
included the sculptors Christo, Arman and Jean Tinguely. Their antic,
absurdist works challenged conventional ideas about art-making in ways
that echoed the earlier Dada movement.
Ms. de Saint Phalle became notorious for what she called "target
paintings," at which darts were thrown, and then for actual "shooting
paintings" and sculptures. In galleries, she would use a .22-caliber
rifle to shoot at plaster sculptures in which she had embedded bags of
paint, causing color to splatter all over.
Ms. de Saint Phalle went on to produce a far different kind of art, an
amalgam of Pop, Surrealism, Folk and outsider art that she prolifically
realized in sculptures, paintings, prints and large public
installations. Inspired in the mid-60's by a visit from the wife of
Larry Rivers, Clarice Rivers, who was then pregnant, Ms. de Saint Phalle
created the first of what would become an extensive population of
"Nanas." (Nana is a mildly rude French term for woman, comparable to
broad.) They were bulbous, archetypal maternal figures like Mexican
piñatas painted in bold colors and decorated with crisp, cartoon
outlines.
In contrast with the aggressive Conceptualism of her early performance
works, the art for which she became best known seemed to flow from an
endlessly fertile, visionary imagination.
The Nanas gave birth to legions of fanciful humanoids, animals, plants
and monsters and a trend away from the refinement of individual objects
toward the creation of whole, fantastic worlds that would be most fully
achieved in ambitious public works like Surrealistic amusement parks.
Made of cement and produced on a gigantic scale, the Nanas became houses
that visitors could enter, and surrounding grounds became teeming,
part-organic, part-architectural mazes. At once avant-garde and
populist, Ms. de Saint Phalle's art had the unusual ability to appeal to
a wide range of viewers, from art-world professionals to children.
In the late 1970's, on acreage in southwestern Tuscany made available by
wealthy friends, Ms. de Saint Phalle began her most ambitious project, a
sprawling sculpture garden featuring 22 large sculptures based on the
fortune-telling Tarot cards. With its wildly grotesque forms decorated
by ceramic tiles, glass and mirrors, it calls to mind the architecture
of Antonio Gaudí, whose work made a lasting impression on Ms. de Saint
Phalle when she first encountered it in the 1950's. Financing it in part
through the sale of a perfume called Niki de Saint Phalle, which she
created for the Jacqueline Cochran company, Ms. de Saint Phalle worked
on the Tarot Garden for 20 years. It opened to the public in 1998.
Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle was born into a wealthy family
on Oct. 29, 1930, at Neuilly-sur-Seine, a Paris suburb, but was partly
raised in New York, where her parents moved after the crash of 1929, and
educated at the Brearley School, among several others. She told of being
thrown out of Brearley for painting the fig leaves on the school
artworks red.
At 18 she eloped with Mr. Mathews, and two years later the couple moved
to France, where she began to paint after a nervous breakdown at age 23.
She was mostly a self-taught artist. Her first solo exhibition took
place in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1956, but she did not begin to show
her work regularly until 1961.
Divorced from Mr. Mathews in 1960, she began a relationship with Jean
Tinguely, the Swiss sculptor known for his kinetic, mechanical
sculptures. They were married in 1971 and she collaborated with him on
many projects. Although they lived separately after their marriage,
their partnership lasted until his death in 1991. Ms. de Saint Phalle
returned to the United States in 1994 to settle in La Jolla, in San
Diego, partly because of her frail health.
In addition to producing public works in cities from Jerusalem to San
Diego, Ms. de Saint Phalle had many museum exhibitions. The Nassau
County Museum of Fine Arts in New York assembled her first American
retrospective in 1987, and a larger retrospective was organized by the
Kunst und Austellunghalle in Bonn in 1992. In 1994, an institution
dedicated to her work, the Niki Museum, opened in Nasu, Japan. In 2000
she won a $140,000 Praemium Imperiale Award given by the Japan Art
Association.
Bob Flaminio
> Niki de Saint Phalle, a Franco-American artist internationally known
> for her colorful, monumental, cartoonlike sculptures and
> environments, died on Tuesday, May 21, 2002, in San Diego,
> California, at the age of 71, from pulmonary failure after an illness
> of several months.
Ms. Phalle? Was she an acquaintance of Ms. Cock?
-Bob