Niki de Saint Phalle
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"La Tempérance"
Signed Niki and numbered 2/10 and stamped Haligon. Executed in 1985. Acrylic, polyester and iron base. Height 75, width 50 cm. Total edition of 10 + 4 AP.
Literature
Pontus Hultén, "Niki de Saint Phalle", 1999, compare p. 256.
More information
Niki de Saint Phalle became a member of the artistic group the Nouveaux Réalistes, with links to Dadaism and pop art, through her relationship with Jean Tinguely in the early 1960s.
NSP’s was inspired to create her Nana sculptures by her pregnant friend Clarice Rivers in 1964. Initially, the sculptures were made of yarn, papier mâché and steel wire; later, NSP made them out of polyester. They are curvy, colourful female shapes that are happy, liberated and godlike women, foreboding a new matriarchal era. NSP also created several Nanas painted in black and white as a reaction to the Civil rights movement in the United States, and as an expression of the artist’s notion that all women are goddesses, regardless of colour.
The ultimate Nana was HON (“SHE”), a monumental, recumbent figure that NSP created together with Jean Tinguely and P O Ultvedt, and which was exhibited at Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1966. HON was a symbol of the independent Nana and was a cathedral that held an entire exhibition hall. NSP was responsible for the exterior and the other two for the interior. Through the 20 m long womb of this giant woman, the crowd would walk into a fantastic world with a cinema, a bar, a slide and various moving sculptures.
Today, the sculpture group Paradiset (“Paradise”), with the monumental Nanas, resides outside of Moderna Museet. The work was created for the World Exhibition in Montreal and subsequently was donated to the museum.
Artist
Niki De Saint Phalle (1930-2002) was a self-taught French painter, sculptor, and film producer. She moved to Mallorca in 1955, and during a visit to Barcelona and Madrid, came in contact with Anotnio Gaudi’s art. This had a huge impact on her own art making and opened unforeseen possibilities for her development as an artist. In particular, it was Gaudi’s “Park Guell” which convinced her to create her own monumental sculpture park, which she bogh the land for in 1979 in Tuscany. The garden “Giardino dei Tarocchi” stood finished in 1998 and displays sculptures of icons drawn from the Tarot cad deck.
For a period, Saint Phalle explored various roles of women by creating life-sized doll-like models. They were normally dressed in white and made of papier maché. They were called Nanas and were presented in Paris in 1965. In the following year, Saint Phalle collaborated with her colleagues Jan Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt for a project at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where they created the well-known sculpture exhibition “Her – A Cathedral”. This giant Nana sculpture had an entrance through its legs where one could walk inside of her. “She” awake a grand reaction across the globe. She eventually married Jean Tinguely in 1971.