Niki de Saint Phalle

I've recently finished reading, though will be looking at the illustrations of for some time, Pontus Hulten's book on the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. The book started as an exhibition catalogue, so the illustrations are wonderful and the artist's working life is outlined well, but the text is just a tad, errr, fawning. All the books on her are catalogues and there's a Foundation to look after her artistic estate and reputation, so for a while a real biography is out of the question.

(Photo mine, Nice 2002)

Some things have to be read from, rather than in, the text. Married and a mother at twenty-one, a few years as a conventional mother gave her a nervous breakdown and she took up painting as a therapy. Now I don't believe in lifestyle-induced nervous breakdowns. Having a life you can't make work doesn't help, but a full-fledged breakdown needs either an unstable personality or chemical assistance. An unstable personality would show in other ways. Perhaps in becoming an artist, separating from your husband and not having much to do with your children. This is not unconventional behaviour, but it is irresponsible. Either that or having two children when you really did not want to live your mother's life over again was irresponsible. It's also clear that she underwent some kind of episode during the years she spent making the Tarot Garden. Refusing to take painkillers and treatment for arthritis to the point where your hands become almost unusable is not, as they say, “normal behaviour”. People don't do that unless they are drinking too much or taking non-prescription drugs. Or of course going mildly doo-lally. She mentions years feeling “stoned” from the medications the doctors gave her.

(Photo mine, Nice 2002)

At one stage she considered suicide, but that is nothing. Not to have considered suicide at some stage of your life just proves you are a block of wood. As long as you are considering it, comforted by the thought, sustained through whatever emotional hell it is by the possibility that you could end it all here and now – as long as you're feeling the pain and considering it, you're not going to do it. Suicides are not done in a wallow of emotion, they are done when the emotion is over and can't get in the way of the practical preparations and the final moment when some banal act will take your own life. You can't be feeling to do that.

(Photo mine, Nice 2002)

The book doesn't examine the commercial side of her life – an artist's commercial life being until recently rather more mysterious than their sex life. She was one of the more successful artists in Europe – though her friends chipped in to provide the $4m she spent on the Tarot Garden over a twenty year period. In 1982 or thereabout she was asked to create a perfume (choose one made by a nose and design the bottles and packaging) and one of the copy-lines is “As controversial as the artist who made it”. Scanning the blogs it seems that those who liked it, are wild about it.

(Photo from Atalier Naff blog)

I remember seeing a documentary about a French art dealer, who was a little sharp around the edges, and in one scene he's wandering round an exhibition, picks up a little figure from a stand and says “It's a Nana, he (the stand's owner) doesn't know what he's got”. Her "best known" work is the Stravinsky Fountain for the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

(Photo from Niki de Saint Phalle Foundation website)

Niki de S-P is one of those quirky artists whose work you either get or not and like or not. If I lived along the Mediterranean the bright colours and rounded shapes of the Nanas would be perfect. In the grey light of suburban London they would look as out of place as Penelope Cruz in a Burger King. If you haven't run across her work before, it's well worth the look. And let's face it, anyone who makes paintings by filling various containers with paint, plastering them onto a canvas and then shooting at the containers with a .22 rifle, has to have something going for them.