ART
PREVIEW
_ Sex,
politics, art
Miranda France charts the career of Niki de Saint Phalle, controversial French artist and subject of a retrospective at the McLellan Galleries.
Niki de Saint Phalle was born in 1930 near Paris, and brought up in New York in an atmosphere she now describes as ‘a narrow space with little liberty or privacy.’ From an early age she sensed a contradiction between her bourgeois background and the poverty of Depression-struck New York. She was wayward, expelled from more than one convent school and briefly became a model, appearing on the covers of Vogue, Life and Harpers Bazaar. At eighteen she eloped with a US Marine but five years later, after the birth of her daughter, she had a nervous breakdown. It was during her recovery that De Saint Phalle began to paint.
If she felt bitter about the sexually unequal world in which she grew up, De Saint Phalle hit back with humour. An early work was Portrait of my Lover, at whose head visitors were encouraged to throw darts. This inspired the ‘shooting paintings’, in
’ “Latin. um
Untitled, 1992
ON FOLLOWING PAGES: GAVIN EVANS O FIVE WOMEN PAINTERS
which she used concealed bags of red pigment to create images that would ‘bleed’ when punctured. Friends and gallery visitors were invited to take a
gun to her meticulous and theatrical constructions.
‘The painting was the victim ,’ she later explained. ‘WHO was the painting? Daddy? All men? Small men? Tall men? Big men? Fat men? Men? My brother John? Or was the painting ME: Did I shoot at myself during a RITUAL which enabled me to die by my own hand and be reborn? I was immortal . . .’
By 1963 De Saint Phalle was living in the avant garde atmosphere of Paris, where she was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollok, Willem de Koonig, and Jean Tinguely, whom she married. She turned her hand to the feminine world, using tacky, kitschy plastic flowers and dolls to create images of womanhood that were more often sinister than celebratory. Then a friend’s pregnancy inspired her long series of ‘Nanas’ (French slang for ‘girls’). These were bulbous, exuberant earth mothers, painted in bright colours that contrasted tellingly with the skinny ‘pale and interesting‘ look exemplified by Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy. The Nanas became something of an obsession; they were usually, but not always, heroines — sometimes they embodied a devouring, destructive force.
‘She’s famous in Germany and France, and to a certain extent in America, but she’s not well known here, compared with her peers. Maybe in Britain we assume that art should be more serious.’
In 1966 she and Tinguely created a giant, ‘penetrable’ Nana for a modern art gallery in Stockholm. Having entered through her vagina, the public could choose between a planetarium in her left breast and a milk bar in her right, a cinema
o , /.,{‘ . Niki do Saint Phalle with ‘Shooting Picture’, 1992 l showing a Greta Garbo film and a gallery of fake paintings. What sounds like a rather worrying experience was evidently tremendously popular with the Swedes, and De Saint Phalle was more than happy to take the credit for an increased birth rate in Stockholm that year.
‘WI-lO was the painting? Daddy? All men? Small men? Tall men? Big men? Fat men? Men? My hrotherJohn? Orwasthe painting ME. . ?’
More giant sculptures followed, including, in Jerusalem, a monster which vomited children down its tongue-like slides. Outside the Pompidou Centre, in Paris, she and Tinguely made the Stravinsky Fountain. But De Saint Phalle had to tire of all that volume, and recently she left the Nanas for the Skinnies, a thin family of air sculptures that literally ‘breathe’. One of these, The New Man is Coming has a ravenous pair of jaws where its groin should be . . . you couldn’t accuse De Saint Phalle of being politically inconsistent over the last forty years.
‘De Saint Phalle’s work has always reflected her changing circumstances and emotions,‘ says Virginia Rigney, of Glasgow Museums. She believes that this may be the exhibition finally to put De Saint Phalle on the map for Britons. ‘She‘s famous in Germany and France, and to a certain extent in America, but she’s not well known here, compared with her peers. Maybe in Britain we assume that art should be more serious. ’Instigated by the Kunst Gallery in Bonn, the retrospective will also be shown in Paris in June. But De Saint Phalle has created a special Loch Ness Monstre for the Scottish leg of her tour. You’ll find it lurking among the palms at the People’s Palace.
Niki de Saint Phalle: Her Life and Art is at the McLellan Galleries, Glasgow, 22 Jan—4 Apr.
50The List 15— 28January I993