“Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life,” at moma PS1, is a ravishing and scandalously overdue New York museum show of the French-American avant-gardist, who died at the age of seventy-one, in 2002, of emphysema probably caused by her use of toxic materials. The self-taught Saint Phalle is one of the late twentieth century’s great creative personalities, ahead of her time in several respects, with traits that once clouded and now halo her importance. Her career had two chief phases: feminist rage, expressed by way of .22 rifles fired at plaster sculptures inside which she had secreted bags of liquid paint, and feminist celebration of womanhood, through sculptures of female bodies, often immense, in fibreglass and polyester resin. The shooting period lasted from 1961 until about 1963. The bodies consumed the rest of her life. Her masterpiece, the Tarot Garden (1979-2002), is a vast sculpture park in Tuscany filled with twenty-two free-form, monumental women, animals, and figures of fantasy, some the size of houses and made habitable with kitchens and plumbing. She was popular in Europe but, until late in life, cut little ice in transatlantic art circles. The problem tracks to a schism, around 1960, with triumphant American formalist abstraction, Pop art, and Minimalism on one side, and, on the other, European Nouveau Réalisme, a cohort (all male but for Saint Phalle) of provocateurs given to neo-Dadaist stunts: Yves Klein painting with pigment-slathered naked women, Arman amassing collections of identical common objects, Daniel Spoerri gluing down remnants of meals and hanging them vertically, Jacques Villeglé presenting ragged, found street posters.
Saint Phalle’s gunplay, realized in Paris in 1961, was a stunt for sure: creation by destruction, theatrically perforating first plaster-covered boards and then figurative plaster sculptures of male subjects—avatars of her hated father, who sexually assaulted her when she was eleven. Some pieces concealed spray cans, for explosive effect when hit. That year, Marcel Duchamp, seventy-four years old, introduced the thirty-year-old Saint Phalle and her friend Jean Tinguely, the Swiss kinetic sculptor, to Salvador Dalí, fifty-seven. In honor of Dalí, they fashioned a full-size bull, which, wheeled out after a bullfight in Catalonia, satisfyingly blew up. Saint Phalle usually performed in fashionable white pants suits. The cultural frisson of a beautiful woman wielding deadly weapons and setting off explosives earned her notoriety in France, but there was scant critical curiosity, anywhere, about the motives of the work: a traumatic personal backstory and a politically edged aspiration to better the world.
Born near Paris in 1930, to a tyrannical French banker father and a suffocatingly pious Roman Catholic American mother, Saint Phalle had a childhood of privilege and of horror, first in France and then, after her father’s finance company failed in the Depression, in America. Both parents were violent. Saint Phalle described the homelife as hellish. Two of her siblings committed suicide as adults. She was expelled from two Catholic schools and from the Brearley School, in New York, which booted her for defacing its classical statues by painting their fig leaves red. (Even so, she always praised Brearley for having instilled self-confidence in her as a young woman.) Starting in her late teens, she modelled for Life, French Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar. At one point, Gloria Steinem spotted Saint Phalle walking down Fifty-seventh Street, purseless and in a cowboy getup. In an interview quoted by the show’s curator, Ruba Katrib, in the catalogue, Steinem recalled thinking, “That is the first free woman I have ever seen in real life. I want to be just like her.”
At the age of eighteen, Saint Phalle married Harry Mathews, a nineteen-year-old American aspiring musician, who became an experimental novelist after the poet John Ashbery introduced him to the charismatically daft early-twentieth-century work of the Frenchman Raymond Roussel. Crosscurrents of creative influence flowed among many of the international bohemians of the period. The couple quickly had a daughter. Then Saint Phalle broke down. She and Mathews were now living in France and both were having affairs. In 1953, after a bout of sexual jealousy compounded by ill health (she suffered from hyperthyroidism), she attempted suicide. For six weeks, she underwent electroshock treatments and psychoanalysis at a clinic in Nice. It seemed to help. Saint Phalle and Mathews had a second child, and the family spent most of the remaining decade moving around Europe. In 1955, in Barcelona, she was flabbergasted by the buildings and the mosaics of Antoni Gaudí. (Gaudí became “my master and my destiny,” she said.) Plunging into art, at first with naïve styles of painting and assemblage, she separated from Mathews in 1960. He took the kids, but she stayed close to him, as she tended to do, all her life, with miscellaneous friends and (a great many) ex-lovers.
Indeed, sociability was Saint Phalle’s element, to the point of blurring her creative identity. At her first shooting performance, she let the invited guests take turns with the gun that she had rented from a fairgrounds for the occasion, delighting in their cathartic pleasure. As free with giving credit as with claiming it, in the Tarot Garden—which she created on an extensive plot of land donated to her by some wealthy friends—Saint Phalle incorporated homages to the Italian workers who had fashioned the steel armatures for her sculptures, covered them with resin, and helped line the exteriors and interiors with ceramic tiles and shards of mirror. (Videos in the show document the years of exacting labor.) She maintained a productive partnership with Tinguely for years, including throughout an intimate relationship that began in the early sixties and resulted, a decade later, in marriage, with the pair collaborating on works that combine her sensuous sculptures and his wittily racketing machinery.
Until 1963, Saint Phalle continued to create patriarchal icons in plaster and, with bullets, make them bleed paint. Some were relief portraits of leading politicians, whom she loathed as a class—one was of John F. Kennedy, before his assassination. Then, in 1965, after some fetching sculptural works, mostly in soft materials, on themes of melancholy brides and elaborate, not terribly menacing monsters, came the first of what she called Nanas, using the French slang that was the rough equivalent of “broads” or “chicks.” The Nanas were inspired by a pregnant friend whose body was very curvy—almost hyperbolically female. (It was Clarice Rivers, wife of the painter Larry Rivers.) Saint Phalle fashioned the shape as a container, hollow but apparently formed of seismic internal forces. Nanas proliferated at sizes small and gigantic, turning dancerly and acrobatic. Saint Phalle mastered gloss techniques for preserving their painted surfaces—in black-and-white and, often, sizzling secondary and tertiary hues—outdoors, in all weather. Nothing about the work jibed with anything then current in art. Most critics, especially American ones, dismissed it. Today, as categorical distinctions among art mediums and styles deliquesce, it comes off as heroic.
There’s a playhouse feeling and, in some cases, a function to Saint Phalle’s big women and to such occasional monsters as “The Golem” (1972), which occupies a playground in Jerusalem. Three snaking red tongues protrude as slides for kids. (When citizens opposed the commission by the city’s mayor, Teddy Kollek, Saint Phalle argued successfully that scary things help children master their fears. It was a big hit.) She brought an unchanging spirit to her public works, occasional architecture (a three-part home in the South of France which nestles children’s rooms inside a Nana’s breasts), and abundant drawings and handmade books. She never winks to educated taste. There’s a frequent tendency to deem Saint Phalle’s childlike imagery sentimental, but I don’t think it is. No matter how playful, the benign quality of her later work drew on the same fund of contrariness—the proto-feminist animus—that fuelled her early weaponized exhibitionism. (She said that she enjoyed the thought of men looking “very small” next to looming Nanas.) At a time that was biased against figuration and only just becoming alert to feminism, she risked—or perhaps guaranteed—condescension. It didn’t faze her at all.
If anything disconcerts about Saint Phalle, it’s a steely consistency of tone. As a prolific pamphleteer during the AIDS crisis, in which she lost many friends, she saw no need to darken her bouncily cartoonish graphic style, though she embellished it with language that conscientiously addressed the disaster. Art was a place in her. Any work by her is like a destination that, once reached, lets you go elsewhere only by retracing the way you came. Other artists are like this, notably those who are termed outsider or self-taught: birds with their single songs. Saint Phalle’s enthusiasm for Gaudí’s sophisticated designs extended to the work of such visionary eccentrics as Ferdinand Cheval, a nineteenth-century French postman and the creator of a surreal imaginary palace; and Simon Rodia, of the Watts Towers, in Los Angeles. This predilection points to a compulsive hold on the life force that had propelled her from the start.
In her later years, Saint Phalle slipped into celebrity. She designed and marketed a perfume, jewelry, and scarves, to finance the protracted construction of the Tarot Garden. (“Why don’t I become my own patron?” she asked.) Those commodities look great, by the way—they are continuous with her inventive drive, in an art world that was on its way to welcoming heterodox pursuits including retail commerce and overt politics. She pioneered, as well, an epochal rise of installational and environmental art, though with forms too idiosyncratic to be directly imitable. The PS1 show is a cascade of bedazzlements. Is it lovable? Not quite. Saint Phalle was too guarded—wound too tightly around herself—to vamp for adoration. Attention was enough. Understanding proved more elusive, but was foreordained, eventually, by a fearlessness that sweeps a viewer along from start to finish. ♦
