Monday Muse: Niki de Saint Phalle
Me with Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nanas. Covered in fabric and yarn, I found these to be charming in their homemade, crafty quality.
Niki de Saint Phalle has always been an inspiration to me, ever since I first learned about her work when I was in high school. I’ll never forget the first time visiting Queen Califia’s Magical Circle and just being completely stunned by how extraordinary it was. Whenever there is a Saint Phalle exhibit in San Diego, I make it a point to go. This past month I visited the remodeled Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in La Jolla to see their exhibit “Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s”. I also visited the Niki exhibit at the Mingei Museum.
I was so inspired by the variety of work that was featured at MCSAD, which spanned from the early 60s to the 1970s. The first part of the exhibition featured her “Tirs” or “Shooting” paintings that she created by enveloping paint bottles and dyes in plaster and then shooting the paintings with a gun so that the paint would pour out of the wound-like opening. The tirs are unlike any of the other Niki work I had seen before and evoke feelings of violence, pain, and death. She was drawing upon Cold War anxieties and uncertainty of life in war-torn Europe and that confusion is reflected well in these works. Some are massive with religious iconography as well as military symbolism and insignia. The work has a sort of masculine feel to it in the violence and penetration of the bullets. She would sometimes stage “happening”-like events where she would complete a tir painting live and invite guests to shoot at the paintings in collaboration.
Departing from the tirs paintings, Niki began creating what she referred to as Nanas. Nana is a French slang term for, chick or broad. She Created the voluptuous ladies who are quite the departure from the tirs. The Nanas evoke images of the Venus of Willendorf and fertility idols, all hips, butts, and boobs. They are painted colorfully or covered in lacy calico and yarn designs. They are indisputably happy and joyful, the complete opposite of the tirs. This work would come to be her signature along with her delightful illustrations. At the MCASD they had a scale model of her giant Nana, Hon, which she constructed with the help of sculptor Jean Tinguely, for a show at the Modena Museet in Stockholm, Sweden.
Poster for Hon, Niki’s massive, interactive Nana. Guests would enter through the vagina of the reclining Nana and explore rooms and tunnels inside.
My favorite work by far was her two larger collage works. These collages combined found imagery and illustration in a way that was so fresh, unlike any of the other work I had seen. It seems like this was a short, transitory period for Niki as an artist where she was experimenting with different ideas. The collage of her pregnant friend, Clarice Rivers, was an inspiration for her later work with Nanas. Filling out the shapes of the body with drawings and imagery gives the viewer a lush sense of narrative as the body unfolds almost like a comic book.
Portrait of Clarice Rivers, combining illustration and collage.
I also loved the collection of magazine articles about Niki and how she was something of an “It Girl” in the late 1960s. The spreads in Vogue are especially fun. I love the one about the inflatable Nanas at the beach!
The work at the Mingei was from later periods when she produced artwork with other artisans and engineers, making furniture and polyester sculpture. These have a slick, produced quality that is undeniably beautiful, but I find these works from her early period so fascinating because her hand is really present. Above is a photo of me with my favorite collage, the big pink lady.
Niki lived in La Jolla at the end of her life so there are always Niki exhibits around town and permanent sculptures in many places. It was so fun for me to get to see some of her early work and to be inspired by her collages. Her work has a feminist quality that celebrates women and I enjoy how she moved through many different aesthetic periods. It’s always a pleasure to see where an artist began and then to see how they ended up. I will always stop for a Niki exhibit and I hope there are many more to come!
