Preview our FALL 2024 catalog, featuring more than 500 new books on art, photography, design, architecture, film, music and visual culture.
LA FáBRICA/GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO
Niki de Saint Phalle
Text by Bloum Cardenas, Camille Morineau, Catherine Francblin, et al.
This gorgeous volume offers the most complete overview in print of the oeuvre of Niki de Saint Phalle, one of the most influential and popular artists of the postwar period. The French-American artist was educated according to the social codes of upper-class New York society, but boldly rejected the expectations of her family to instead choose a career in art. Moving to Paris in the 1960s, she befriended the Nouveau Réaliste artists Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely, creating her famous Shooting Paintings, the Nanas (brightly chromatic biomorphic sculptures of female archetypes), as well as experimental films, decors and costumes for ballet productions and collaborations with Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg and others. Saint Phalle was adept at using the media to consolidate her public image, and soon became an icon of the 1960s art scene, attaining a broad cultural profile that was furthered by her numerous public art projects, including the Tarot Garden in Tuscany and the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris. This superbly produced publication—which features a die-cut cover through which Saint Phalle peers, aiming her gun—presents her works in all media, along with ephemera and archival photographs documenting her rich career and life.
Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) was born near Paris and moved to the US in 1933. During her teen years Saint Phalle was a fashion model and appeared on the cover of Life in 1949 and, three years later, on the cover of French Vogue. At 18 Saint Phalle eloped with author Harry Mathews and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later to Paris, where she exhibited at the Alexander Iolas Gallery. In 1971 Saint Phalle married Jean Tinguely, and throughout that decade created the public sculptures and parks for which she became celebrated. Saint Phalle died of emphysema in California in May 2002.
Featured image, of the public entering Hon (1965), is reproduced from Niki de Saint Phalle.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Hyperallergic
Eunice Lipton
The show opens with collages and paintings in earnest dialogue with Pollock, Dubuffet, and Rauschenberg that the self-taught artist made between the ages of 28 and 31. From 1960 to 1963 she executed her famous Tirs (Shoot) pieces, which drip like Pollocks but which de Saint Phalle produced by shooting a rifle at balloons of colorful paint mounted on white canvases. In the early 1960s, this aristocratic Catholic woman who’d been brought up in a strict household attacked the church with sculptures in the shape of altars strewn with crucifixes. In the mid-‘60s she constructed giant, heavy-hearted bride-ghosts and modern Venus of Willendorfs squeezing out babies. In perfectly calibrated formal choices, de Saint Phalle disfigured long-held articles of faith — high art, the family, the church.
But then, seemingly out of nowhere, came the Nanas, those girls as heart-stoppingly different from de Saint Phalle’s previous work as Cézanne’s “The Eternal Feminine” is from any of his still lifes or Mondrian’s grids are from his early writhing trees. These Nanas — rotund, ebullient, hungry girls dressed in bold primary colors — twirl on tippy toes and look like they’re having a grand old time. They glance back at French art history to Matisse’s jubilant dancers and the sturdy females of Gaston Lachaise and Aristide Maillol, and even, surprisingly, to Rodin.
artcritical
Paul Maziar
The book is expansive, taking us from her beginnings with writer Harry Mathews, to happenings and the theater, to the end of her creatively fruitful life in 2002. It contains a marvelously detailed timeline, giving a sense of why a lot of her art looks the way it does — with a palpable rage, always a contemptuousness flirting with a kind of heartbreaking and joyous beauty.
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A female artist had to be fearless to make a name for herself in the misogynistic 60s—and French sculptor, painter and filmmaker Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) was most definitely fearless. From the 50s to the early 2000s, de Saint Phalle embraced what made others nervous; often, the female body itself. continue to blog
"Very early on I decided to become a heroine. Who would I be? George Sand? Joan of Arc? Napoleon in skirts? What did it matter who I would be? The main thing was it had to be difficult, grandiose, exciting." Featured photograph of the renowned French sculptor, painter and filmmaker Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) while she was still working as a fashion model in 1953, is reproduced from La Fabrica's exemplary new monograph, one of our top Holiday Gift Books of 2015. "I liked and didn't like that profession. I always turned up like a slob. They said my hair was never right, and I wasn't that good at being made up. Nevertheless I did get jobs because some photographers liked me. It was a quick and easy way of making money. I never took it seriously and I knew it wasn't something I would do for very long." continue to blog
"If today I consider myself almost the only poet, the only sculptor capable of creating something poetic, it's precisely because I'm a woman. Men with their rockets, their atomic bomb, and all that filth they've dumped on us… they've sterilized themselves. All that's left to them is the head or its appearances, and that is why they're no longer able to create anything in today's art world… Men have nothing to express anymore except a profound jealousy of woman and her creative power. Women can make kids, but they can't… My main concern is creation… I thirst after creation, and that's why at a certain point I created Accouchements: women giving birth." Excerpt from Maurice Rheims' 1965 Vogue Paris interview with the artist and this 1979 overpainted photograph of her legendary 1966 walk-in reclining nude sculptural environment, "Hon," (realized in collaboration with Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvdt) are reproduced from La Fabrica's comprehensive new monograph. continue to blog
In a 1999 letter to her granddaughter Bloum Cardenas, Niki de Saint Phalle wrote, "Things started to go wrong when my bust grew. It was then that the dark side of my idealistic father showed itself. My father started to watch my breasts getting larger and my hips getting wider, and that interested him more than our discussions about politics or life. I was moreover quite a pretty girl. I became the object of his desire to exercise total power over me. Something happened between us, something which turned me away from my father forever. All that love was transformed into hate. I felt I'd been murdered. I could no longer stand to be in the same room with him. In 1961, daddy, I took my revenge by shooting at my paintings with a REAL GUN. Embedded in the plastic were pockets of paint. I shot you green and red and blue and yellow. YOU BASTARD! When you saw that, did you ever guess it was you I was shooting at?" Shunk-Kender's iconic image of de Saint Phalle during a shooting session at the Impasse Ronsin, 1961, is reproduced from La Fabrica's essential new monograph. continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 10 x 11.75 in. / 368 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $87 ISBN: 9788415691983 PUBLISHER: La Fábrica/Guggenheim Museum Bilbao AVAILABLE: 6/23/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ASIA ME
Published by La Fábrica/Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Text by Bloum Cardenas, Camille Morineau, Catherine Francblin, et al.
This gorgeous volume offers the most complete overview in print of the oeuvre of Niki de Saint Phalle, one of the most influential and popular artists of the postwar period. The French-American artist was educated according to the social codes of upper-class New York society, but boldly rejected the expectations of her family to instead choose a career in art. Moving to Paris in the 1960s, she befriended the Nouveau Réaliste artists Martial Raysse, Daniel Spoerri and Jean Tinguely, creating her famous Shooting Paintings, the Nanas (brightly chromatic biomorphic sculptures of female archetypes), as well as experimental films, decors and costumes for ballet productions and collaborations with Tinguely, Robert Rauschenberg and others. Saint Phalle was adept at using the media to consolidate her public image, and soon became an icon of the 1960s art scene, attaining a broad cultural profile that was furthered by her numerous public art projects, including the Tarot Garden in Tuscany and the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris. This superbly produced publication—which features a die-cut cover through which Saint Phalle peers, aiming her gun—presents her works in all media, along with ephemera and archival photographs documenting her rich career and life.
Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) was born near Paris and moved to the US in 1933. During her teen years Saint Phalle was a fashion model and appeared on the cover of Life in 1949 and, three years later, on the cover of French Vogue. At 18 Saint Phalle eloped with author Harry Mathews and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later to Paris, where she exhibited at the Alexander Iolas Gallery. In 1971 Saint Phalle married Jean Tinguely, and throughout that decade created the public sculptures and parks for which she became celebrated. Saint Phalle died of emphysema in California in May 2002.
