Niki De Saint Phalle: My Art, My Dreams

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Summary: the legacy of Matisse
Review: Niki de Saint Phalle was a French artist who was once a model, provocateur, and a scion of the feminine principle in the great Matissean way. Her first paintings were man-hating objects d'art, based, no doubt, on Sanit Phalle's rejection of patriarchy, and possibly her troubled situation surrounding her first husband, the affluent novelist Harry Mathews.

Saint Phalle also became known for creating paintings to be shot at with a rifle: she would place paint cans on a canvas, and she would, or maybe another artist like Rauschenberg or Tinguely would, shoot a gun at these paintings. These violent acts would be notorious, creating a drug-like sensation, which would become an asterisk in the annuals of performance art and happenings in the 1960s.

Saint Phalle went back to the style of her earlier art, which explored this lost world of pleasure, very much like Henri Matisse, when she created these sculptures of large, natural women, which she called "Nanas." The largest one "The Hon (1965)," was built by a group of artists, and filled a museum in Stockholm, where spectators could enter through the body, through the vagina. I guess that you had to pay the museum staff (the pimp) for this privilege?

Saint Phalle then collaborated with her second husband, Jean Tinguely, on several projects in the 1970s: this is when the esthetic legacies and ramifications of the two great ones, Duchamp and Matisse, came together in their offspring, Tinguely and Saint Phalle. One can see theri work in Paris, a homage to Stranvinsky in Centre Pompidou (1982): Tinguely's hard machinery which became a parody of rationalism, and Saint Phalle's soft bodies which were discursions in Mediterranean pleasure, yet evocative of Bataille's problematic connection to the excremental world. Saint Phalle spent several years working on her Gaudi-like sculptural garden in Italy, The Taror Gardens, in Garavivvhio (Tuscany). Later in the 1980s, she resurfaced with her book about AIDS.

Many people now find her work dated and possibly hippy dippy. In fact she was one of the original feminist artists, with any self-consciousness or political agenda. Her work, due to its scope and relation to European history and art, has little to do with American artists of the same time, so many people have ignored it. Not many have seen it. Her collage work does have a tangential relationship to Pop Art. There is a movie about her life called "Who Is The Monster: You Or Me?" She died finally in summer 2003.