Biography of Niki de Saint Phalle

Niki de Saint Phalle (born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle on 29 October 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine; died 21 May 2002 in La Jolla, California) was a French-American artist. She worked with painting, assemblage, performance, film, graphic art, sculpture and walk-in architecture. She became known for her shooting paintings, the vividly colored Nanas and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany.

Childhood between France and New York

Saint Phalle was born into a wealthy French-American family that lost security after the economic crash. As a child she moved with her family to New York, while remaining closely connected with France through relatives and travel. Her youth was marked by rebellion, changes of school and grave injuries. Later she spoke publicly about violence in the family and sexual abuse by her father. Many early images and actions carry a palpable force, while her work cannot be reduced to that experience.

Modeling, crisis and painting

As a young woman Saint Phalle worked as a model, with photographs appearing in fashion magazines. At eighteen she married Harry Mathews, later a writer, and had two children. In 1953 she was treated in a clinic in Nice after a mental breakdown. There she began to paint seriously and found in art a way to order inner violence, memory and imagination. She remained self-taught, but deliberately sought contact with artists and new forms of European postwar art.

Shooting paintings and Nouveau Réalisme

In the early 1960s Saint Phalle developed her Tirs, the shooting paintings. She mounted objects and bags of paint onto reliefs and had rifles or pistols fired at the works, so that paint ran out and the image came into being during the action. These works were aggressive, theatrical and public. They attacked fixed images of femininity, religion, nation and authority. Saint Phalle became part of Nouveau Réalisme and remained one of the few women there to assert a voice of her own.

Nanas and public spaces

From 1965 onward she created the Nanas: large, colorful, dancing female figures with rounded forms, ornaments and an almost overwhelming presence. They seemed joyful, but not harmless. After the wounding and destructive shooting paintings, the Nanas placed female bodies in space as force, movement and self-confident abundance. In 1966 Hon at Moderna Museet in Stockholm became a walk-in giant sculpture. Later she created numerous public works, often with Jean Tinguely or in direct dialogue with architecture.

Tarot Garden

The Giardino dei Tarocchi in Garavicchio became Saint Phalle's largest life project. Inspired by Antoni Gaudí, Park Güell and tarot imagery, she built over many years a landscape of monumental figures, mirrors, ceramics, glass and mosaics. She financed the project through her own resources, editions and a perfume. The garden opened to the public in 1998 and presents art not as an object in a museum, but as an environment people can enter.

Later years and death

In the 1990s Saint Phalle moved to La Jolla, California, for health reasons. Her lung problems were connected with toxic fumes and materials she had used over decades. She remained active, working on projects in California, Hanover and Jerusalem, and also supported AIDS education. Niki de Saint Phalle died in La Jolla on 21 May 2002. Her work joins pain, color, anger and delight without smoothing away those contradictions.