Born in Neuilly, France, in 1930, but raised in New York, Niki de Saint Phalle was featured on the cover of Life in 1949 and described in its pages as “a blonde young lady that combines American endurance and French chic.” The article notes that she is careful with her wardrobe and goes on to report that “to conserve closet space and her allowance, she likes double-purpose clothes” such as the outfit she is wearing—a “white silk taffeta [skirt] whose separate top for full dress evenings costs $19.95.” Then a nineteen-year-old post-debutante and model, Saint Phalle would grow up to become a leading feminist artist, described by the New York Times after her death in 2002 as “a heroine to feminism before the movement even emerged.”
De Saint Phalle was indubitably chic. Her style reportedly inspired Yves Saint Laurent’s 1966 Le Smoking tuxedo suit, which caused a stir in Paris—some deemed it inappropriate for ladies to wear trousers to dinner, but evidently Saint Laurent loved the way Saint Phalle wore men’s suits with high heels. Possibly he loved her defiant attitude, too; in any case, it all translated into one of his most enduring silhouettes.
Getty Images: Bert Stern/Condé Nast via Getty Images
De Saint Phalle among her Nana sculptures, photographed by Bert Stern for Vogue, April 1968.
In the February 1950 Vogue, Saint Phalle appeared in a beige crepe de chine shirt alongside the announcement of her marriage at age eighteen to the writer Harry Matthews. They lived like bohemians for a while, moving around Europe, then in the mid-1950s they settled in Paris, occupying one of the famed half-derelict studios in Montparnasse’s Impasse Ronsin. In 1956, however, she met the Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, and they began to collaborate on artwork. She left Matthews and moved in with Tinguely in 1960 and continued her avant-garde adventure. She started making her Tirs (gunshot) paintings in February 1961, at first shooting an ex-lover’s shirt and then moving on to plaster molds embedded with paint and collaged with kitchen utensils, doll’s arms, and razors, among other found objects. She would fire a .22-caliber rifle at them, and they would explode with color and ferocity. These performance pieces made Phalle an art-world phenomenon. She wore a white jumpsuit and black boots while taking aim and was often joined by fellow artists, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. She appeared strong, terrifying, and tough, with a panache and intensity few could compete with. In a posthumous 2016 New Yorker article, she was quoted: “Performance art did not yet exist, but this was a performance. Here I was, an attractive girl (if I had been ugly, they would have said I had a complex and not paid any attention), screaming against men in my interviews and shooting.”
Jane Fonda appeared at one of Saint Phalle’s famous Tirs shooting performances in Malibu in 1962; Robert Rauschenberg bought one of the paintings.
In 1969 Le Grand Palais filmed an interview with Saint Phalle, in which she said, “Women could administrate this world much better [than men]. Black power and women power: if they get together and take over everything. That’s the solution. A new world of joy.” This radical spirit attracted designer Maria Grazia Chiuri, the first female artistic director at the legendary fashion house of Dior, who described Saint Phalle after Dior’s spring 2018 show, as a “very revolutionary woman, really inspiring, and really strong in herself.” Chiuri’s collection synchronized Saint Phalle’s personal style and her art: the artist’s famous veiled berets were reimagined by milliner Stephen Jones and worn by models in dresses and skirts that were decorated with Saint Phalle’s trademark swirling serpents, tarot card characters, cartoonish colors, and swirls. The cover of her autobiography, Traces, was emblazoned on luxe T-shirts. The show laid bare Saint Phalle’s essence, but it wasn’t the first time that the house of Dior had fallen in love with her. A 1971 Vogue spread showcases the French country residence of Marc Bohan, near Fontainebleau. Bohan led Dior in 1960, and throughout his home were Saint Phalle works in lithograph, crayon, and watercolor, as well as a gigantic green-and-black Nana figure in the dining room. Bohan said, “Niki is a neighbor, a great artist, and a great friend.” Chiuri discovered the connection when researching her Saint Phalle–inspired collection, saying, “I found this picture with Niki de Saint Phalle on top of a camel, and also a letter that she wrote to Mr. Marc Bohan, where she said, ‘Thank you for the outfit that you did for me.’”
I never know what is next. I change things as I go along. Nothing is really predictable. There was no preconceived plan.
—Niki de Saint Phalle, Vogue, 1987
Getty Images: Victor Virgile/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Designer Julie de Libran’s autumn 2017 ready-to-wear collection for Sonia Rykiel was inspired by Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nana sculptures. Here is a photograph from the runway presentation during Paris Fashion Week, March 2017.
Other designers, too, are drawn to Saint Phalle. David Koma, a graduate of Central Saint Martins whose work has been worn by Lady Gaga, created a collection in 2009 fueled by the curvaceous lines of Saint Phalle’s colossal Nanas, colorful sculptures of animals and humans she began making in 1964. The most famous was Hon, made in 1966 with the help of Tinguely: a temporary installation at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The open legs of the massive figure (its full title was Hon-en-Katedrall, [She-a-Cathedral in Swedish]) served as a visitors’ entrance to the exhibition for which it was created.
The aesthetic of the Nanas would influence Saint Phalle’s later Tarot Garden in Tuscany, a sculpture park she would call her life’s work. She took on commercial ventures to power her art projects, such as a perfume she created in the 1980s—the bottle, a blue cube; the stopper, two entwined serpents—and miniature inflatable Nana swimming pool accessories produced in the 1970s and sold at Bloomingdale’s in various sizes. She couldn’t stop herself from creating by any means necessary, explaining, “I’m not someone who can change society except for showing some kind of vision of these happy, joyous, domineering women. That’s all that I can do.”