In her multifaceted artistic career, Niki de Saint Phalle explored femininity, gender inequality, violence, and joy. She continually rejected traditional conventions in art and society, caring little for what others thought about her work. Saint Phalle created highly expressive imagery that celebrated the energy of the curvaceous female form and protested the oppression of women by a patriarchal society. The artist produced some of the most ambitious sculptural environments of the 20th century, along with intensely personal works that reflected on her inner life and relationships.
Content Warning: This post contains discussions that some readers may find sensitive or offensive. Reader discretion is advised.
1. Niki de Saint Phalle Came From a Wealthy Family
In 1930, Niki de Saint Phalle was born the second child of five to Count André-Marie de Saint Phalle and his wife Jacqueline. They were a French/American family living in Neuilly-sur-Seine, the wealthiest suburb of Paris. The artist’s American mother shortened her given name—Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle—to Niki. When Niki’s father—a member of the thirteenth-oldest aristocratic family in France—closed his financial business a year after the stock market crashed, she was sent to live at her grandparents’ château while her parents and older brother resettled in New York City.
Niki was only a few months old when they left her but three years old when she reunited with her family in the States. She endured a strict Catholic upbringing in New York’s exclusive Upper East Side neighborhood. Her mother had a violent temper and beat her children, two of whom committed suicide as adults.
Saint Phalle was expelled from Catholic school and again from New York’s prestigious Brearley School, where she defaced its classical sculptures by painting their fig leaves red. At eighteen, she married a childhood friend, Harry Mathews—a man with a similar rebellious spirit—and worked as a fashion model for magazines including Vogue and Life.
2. She Had a Troubled Marriage
At 21, Saint Phalle gave birth to her daughter, Laura. The following year, she, Harry, and Laura moved to France, and Niki found herself suffocated by domestic life. To make matters worse, she was suffering from hyperthyroidism, and both she and Harry were having affairs. Harry was seeing the French wife of an English lord, and Niki took revenge by sleeping with the husband. He was an older man who suffered from depression. His talk of suicide intrigued Niki. She began imagining herself on a rubber raft adrift at sea and armed with a large safety pin. She also began hiding sharp objects like razors, knives, and scissors under her mattress.
When Harry’s mistress showed up at their home one evening, Niki attacked her. She then swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills but was so adrenaline-filled that the overdose had no effect. A short time later, Harry found the dangerous stash of sharp instruments under Niki’s mattress and took her to a psychiatric clinic in Nice, where they treated her with electric shock therapy. The doctors said the treatment could take five years. Once she was allowed to walk in the garden, though, Niki started gathering twigs and leaves for collages. No longer burdened with mandatory domestic chores, she immersed herself in art-making and began feeling better. In six weeks, they released her.
3. She Worked in Numerous Artistic Mediums
Niki de Saint Phalle said: “I started painting in the madhouse, where I learnt how to translate emotions, fear, violence, hope and joy into painting. It was through creation that I discovered the somber depths of depression, and how to overcome it.” As her passion for art grew, she rejected formal training, preferring to express herself in her own original way. She also began feeling the need for independence from the constant responsibilities of childrearing that society placed squarely on the shoulders of women. In 1960, five years after her son Phillip was born, Harry moved into his own apartment with the children. Later that year, Niki moved in with artist Jean Tinguely. Although Niki maintained constant contact with her children, she never got over the guilt of shifting the primary responsibility for their wellbeing to Harry.
Saint Phalle went on to become the only female member of the Nouveaux Réalistes, an avant-garde art movement intent on creating “new ways of perceiving the real,” something Niki desperately needed. In her thirties, Saint Phalle began an art performance series called The Shootings, in which she created paintings by firing a gun at paint-filled objects embedded in plaster. When shot, the objects exploded color across the painting’s white surface. Bloum Cardenas, Niki’s granddaughter and director of the Niki de Saint Phalle Charitable Art Foundation, explained that The Shootings were a way to vent her anger at the injustices in the world. Saint Phalle said in a television interview, “Only a woman could use those destructive contraptions that man has imagined for a constructive end.”
But Niki did more than vent her anger at society. She actively campaigned against racial segregation, climate change, gun violence, and especially the injustices done to women. Devastated by the deaths of many of her friends due to AIDS, she also worked to raise awareness of the disease and to offer prevention strategies. Saint Phalle collaborated with Swiss immunologist Silvio Barandun to write and illustrate the book AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands (1986).
4. She Came up With Nanas
Saint Phalle is best known today for her Nanas (or Chicks in French)—joyous, unstoppable, life-affirming goddesses of fertility. But they did not start that way. In 1963—the year she and Harry finally divorced—Saint Phalle began creating a sculptural series of large, distressed-looking brides. These ghostly female figures appear overwhelmed by voluminous wedding gowns encrusted with the debris of domestic life and motherhood—doll parts, toy soldiers, toy airplanes, baby shoes, and petrified flowers. The works protested the stereotypical societal roles for women—roles established by a patriarchal society and designed to keep women in their place. But soon, these disturbing figures evolved from pained, colorless symbols of female oppression to monumental multi-colored assertions of female freedom. The Nanas were born!
Saint Phalle’s first large-scale Nana—Hön (She in Swedish)—was created for a Stockholm exhibition in 1966. She was a ninety-foot-long reclining Nana that Niki called a “cathedral.” People were invited to walk inside the figure through her vagina.
Niki wrote about Hön this way: “The Nana is lying down and pregnant and, through a series of stairs and steps, you can reach the terrace above the belly from where you can enjoy a panoramic view of the visitors ready to enter and of the conspicuously painted legs. Nothing pornographic, the HON is painted like an Easter egg, with those same bright colors that I have always used and loved. It is like a great goddess of fertility comfortably lying in its immensity, ready to generously welcome thousands of visitors that it absorbs, devours and gives birth to again. . .”
5. Niki de Saint Phalle Had a Dark Secret
When Saint Phalle was sixty-three, she published a short book called Mon Secret. In this book, she revealed that her father sexually abused her starting at age eleven. She stated: “I wrote this book first for myself, to try to finally free myself from this tragedy that played such a determining role in my life. I am a survivor of death, I needed to finally let the little girl in me speak. My text is the desperate cry of the little girl.”
In 1973—21 years before publishing Mon Secret—Niki had tried to exorcize the hold this terrifying experience had on her by making a film with Peter Whitehead called Daddy. In the movie, the daughter kills the father, but the scene does nothing to rid Niki of her pain. This personal trauma continued to haunt her, along with the overall societal oppression of women she saw all around her.
Despite these torments, she never gave up her quest for freedom. She worked constantly across multiple disciplines—drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, printmaking, writing—to craft her own unencumbered mythical world filled with angels and demons, snakes and birds, goddesses, sorcerers, and queens.
6. Niki de Saint Phalle Made a Monument
The same year Saint Phalle published her book, she moved to La Jolla, California, for her health. At seventy, she began working on a sculpture garden based on California’s mythology and history. It is called Queen Califia’s Magical Circle. Tucked away in Kit Carson Park, this mythical masterpiece is about fifteen minutes from downtown Escondido, California. Queen Califia is a fictional pagan warrior who rules the equally fictional island of California in Garcia Rodríguez de Montalvo’s 16th-century Spanish novel, The Adventures of Esplandián. Montalvo describes his mythical island and its inhabitants in this way: “. . . there is an island called California, very close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise, which was inhabited by black women without a single man among them, and they lived in the manner of Amazons. They were robust of body with strong passionate hearts and great virtue.”
Montalvo’s California captured Spanish imaginations in the 16th century, as did the idea of a Terrestrial Paradise (often described as a land of luxury with beautiful women draped in gold and pearls). Even the sailors serving the Spanish conquistador, Hernán Cortés, knew of this elusive “paradise” and Montalvo’s make-believe island of California. On one of their expeditions to explore the Mexican Pacific coast, Cortés’ men landed in today’s Baja California. They reported they’d discovered what they thought was a large island with an abundance of pearls. They imagined they had found California, and the name stuck, at least informally. By the 18th century, though, the whole Spanish-controlled Pacific coast had been officially designated as California. Montalvo’s fairy-tale land—close to a Terrestrial Paradise and inhabited by strong, passionate women—was finally proclaimed real.
It’s easy to see why this subject captured Saint Phalle’s imagination when she moved to California and why Queen Califia’s Magical Circle is a fitting finale for Saint Phalle’s monumental art. Queen Califia’s Magical Circle is a mosaic masterpiece. It begins with an undulating wall surmounted by serpents that encircle the garden. The wall opens to a black-and-white maze that winds its way into an inner courtyard with nine monumental sculptures.
In the middle of this courtyard, the mythical monarch stands atop a gigantic eagle with five ponderous feet (four with talons, one without)—perhaps a reimagining of one of the hundreds of trained griffins Queen Califia was said to have commanded. Griffins are legendary creatures with heads and wings of eagles, bodies of lions, and talons on their front feet. While Queen Califia presides in the center of her Magical Circle, eight totemic sculptures keep guard around her. Nothing can harm her or her mythical Queendom.
Every surface in the garden is covered with mosaics made from an extraordinary variety of materials, including glass, ceramic tiles, and polished stone.Unfortunately, the artist did not live to see the garden completed with Queen Califia rising triumphantly and splendidly above her mythical California Queendom. Niki de Saint Phalle died in 2002 of lung disease caused by inhaling the toxic polyester dust from her sculptures—a strange twist of fate. The very thing that saved her life—art—also took her life. Queen Califia’s Magical Circle was the only sculpture garden Saint Phalle created in the United States and the last major project she realized.
