Biografía
Catherine Marie- Agnès de Saint Phalle was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine on the 29th of October, 1930. Her father lost all the family’s money in 1930 when the stock market crashed and so Saint Phalle remained in France with her paternal grandparents while her father began work at the family’s bank in New York. She would as a result live between The U.S. and France during her formative years.
In New York, she became known as Niki, and it was there that she would study in various schools after being expelled from the Sacred Heart Convent school. In the Brearley School, she read Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare and the Classics. She took part in performances and wrote theatrical works and poems such as the plague. However, she was expelled again after painting some of the school’s statues a brilliant red colour.
A while later she worked as a model at Vogue and made the front cover of the magazine Life. At just 19 years of age, she eloped with Harry Mathews and married him, by 1950 they had settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There Mathews studied music at Harvard and Saint Phalle would paint her first oil paintings while there.
After the birth of her daughter Laura, in 1952, the couple moved to Paris where Mathews studied music again and Saint Phalle studied theatre. They spent their summers in the south of France, Spain and Italy, visiting museums, but it would be the cathedrals that would later influence Saint Phalle’s work.
In 1953, after suffering from a severe nervous breakdown, she was admitted to a hospital in Nice. Painting was what helped her to overcome her suffering and so she decided to become an artist. On returning to Paris, she met the American painter Hugh Weiss, and he would become her mentor for the next five years.
Visits to Madrid and Barcelona would end up being definitive in changing her life, for it was the work of Gaudí, specifically Parque Güell, that gave the artist the idea of creating her very own sculptural garden. In 1956 she exhibited for the first time at Sant Gallen with a series of oil paintings and it was there that she met Jean Tinguely. This meeting led to a collaboration on her first sculpture which was an iron structure covered in plaster.
In 1960 she separated from her husband, began to share a Studio with Tinguely and exhibited in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden, where she acquired various works. In February she organised the first of her “shootings” in a festive setting where she used a rifle to shoot at balloons full of paint. These were placed on top of canvases and objects made of plaster. The result was the creation of some abstract works.
The violence parodies abstract expressionism, the Action Painting of Jackson Pollock, the resulting images known as “shooting paintings”. Members of New Realism attended the event and its founding member, Restany, was so enthused that he invited Saint Phalle to join the group.
On the 10th of June, in the American Embassy in Paris, she took part in one of the concerts of John Cage, Variations II. While he played his music on the piano, the artists carried out their works of art on stage.
In 1961, Pierre Restany organised her first solo exhibition titled Féu a volonté, and all the New Realists were there to offer support. Saint Phalle also exhibited her work alongside her fellow New Realists, standing out for her caustic humour. In her reliefs, she used the assemblage technique to create sculptures from waste items and everyday objects that keep with the spirit of the group.
However, her sensitivity and her violent and sarcastic language expressed a psychological reality that was being suppressed by the social limitations placed on her. Props included video games, crucifixes, and waste, all coloured gold to parody the violence of religious art.
In 1964 she constructed her first human figures, the Nanas, and in doing so created an essentialist female iconography. These enormous balloon-like structures are almost caricatures of the typical woman who appears in mass media imagery. They are made of either papier mache or plastic and painted in bright colours, sometimes on a monumental scale.
For a while, they are her most important pieces of work, stupid dolls, crucified or even dressed up like a giant bride who carries the weight of the world’s unhappiness. All in all, they are an incisive commentary on the position of the female in the 1960s.
In 1966 she created an enormous sculpture with Tinguely called Hon (she in Swedish), made for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Hon was a different Nana to the rest: lying down and 20 metres long, the public had to enter through her vagina to access the facilities and films that awaited them there.
What followed was a less subversive period and cheerful figures made from polyutherane, it was a fantasy world populated with strange animals and colourful and lively objects. Their appearance was almost pop-art-esque.
In 1979 she manages to make her dream of a sculpture garden a reality in Garavicchio, Italy. It consisted of 22 large-scale pieces inspired by Tarot cards and is aptly named Giardino dei Tarocchi, it is a work that she completed alongside long-time collaborator Tinguely.
Throughout her career, she would produce numerous sculptures for public spaces such as the famous Stravinsky fountain, a work she carried out with her husband. Located next to the Pompidou Centre and inaugurated in 1983, it is today one of the most popular monuments in Paris.
Saint Phalle exhibited on many occasions, and her creative projects varied from bronze sculptures to perfume and jewellery design. She even made a cartoon film alongside her son Felipe, which was based on a book on AIDS, the revised version of this book was published by the French Agency for the Fight against Aids, and it was distributed throughout all the primary schools in France.
Saint Phalle died in San Diego, California, in 2002, whilst working on a new sculpture garden named La Gruta, it was her last big project and was completed by her granddaughter.
