In 1961 artist Niki de Saint Phalle started developing collage works made with assorted found objects and toys plastered on wood. Once finished she would hang cans or bags of paint in front of them or lodge containers of paint in her assemblages. She would then proceed to shoot at the packets of paint with a .22 rifle and release their contents onto the plaster reliefs. The act of firing with a gun at the containers of paint generated live action painting and a theatrical performance.
In Niki de Saint Phalle: The Garden of Secrets by French writer, artist and graphic novelist Dominique Osuch and illustrator Sandrine Martin (translated by Joe Johnson and published by NBM Publishing), this episode is symbolic since, while shooting at the paintings, Niki hits all the people and the things that made her suffer - from her abusive father to men in general, from the schools she attended as a child to church and conventions - she even shot at her old self, releasing in this way the colourful ghost of creation trapped in her heart and mind.
This is just one of the many episodes recounted in this graphic novel, a biography of the artist that proceeds in short chapters, each of them introduced by one of Niki's beloved tarots.
The story of Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle starts with her birth in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, and at the very beginning it is told in black and white. Her father, the banker Count André-Marie Fal de Saint Phalle, and her mother, Jeanne Jacqueline Harper, moved to the States after her birth, leaving the young child with her grandparents in Nièvre.
Neglected, Marie-Agnès started listening to her interior voice that materialises in the pages of the graphic novel as a mysteriously colourful ghost, an aura of colour called Niki.
Marie-Agnès/Niki rejoined her parents in the States in the early '30s: rejecting the conservative values of her family, she was often expelled from the Catholic schools she attended (she was dismissed from the Brearley School after she painted in red the fig leaves on the school's classical statuary, an incident included in the graphic novel), she then became a fashion model, appearing on the cover of Life and French Vogue, and in the pages of Elle and Harper's Bazaar.
At 18 Niki married Harry Mathews: the young couple had two children and led a bohemian life at the very beginning, but Niki started suffering recurring physical and mental illnesses that often threatened her life. She also went through electroshock and insulin shock therapy after attempting suicide when she discovered her husband was having an affair. Institutionalised in a psychiatric ward in Nice, she focused on art as soon as she was released, as she also states in the graphic novel - "I came in crazy, I'll come out painting."
Fascinated by Antoni Gaudí's Park Güell, Niki felt once again inspired and started fantasising about a garden-based artwork. After separating from Harry, Niki met Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, who became her life partner and collaborator as well.
From then on she developed new styles and works, focusing on her "Nanas" that, as the years passed, became more joyously colourful and exuberant. One of the most famous Nanas - the giant Hon-en-Katedrall ("She-a-Cathedral") - was an enormous figure of a woman that could be entered through the vagina and that featured (among the other spaces) a milk bar, a 12-seat cinema theatre, a fish pond, a brain built by Tinguely, and a playground slide for children. Installed at the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, Sweden, the "Hon" is remembered and celebrated also in the graphic novel.
The writers follow the development of the Nanas that evolved from plaster over a wire framework to composite fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic, while chronicling the various arty adventures Niki was involved in. Despite her multiple health problems (attributed to repeated exposure to glass fibers and petrochemical fumes from the materials she had used), Niki launched various ambitious projects - the monumental Tarot Garden in Tuscany, further collaborations with Jean Tinguely, efforts to raise funds for galleries, events and museums, and AIDS: You Can't Catch It Holding Hands, a book Niki did in collaboration with Silvio Barandun, a German medical professor of immunology.
The graphic novel goes through all these episodes in a symbolical way: at first black and white tones prevail and Niki's interior voice is just a dusty green shadow.
Dark demons haunt Niki when she reveals she was abused by her father, an episode that later on in her life became the inspiration for her 1972 surreal horror film "Daddy", that dealt with her guilt over her father's abuse. Yet, when Niki finds her path in life through art, colours explode on the page and she becomes an unstoppable creator and collaboratror as proved by the works she did with Tinguely, from Le Cyclop, in Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris, to the Stravinsky Fountain, a 15-piece sculptural fountain for Igor Stravinsky Square, located next to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
While Niki is obviously the main protagonist of the story, the graphic novel also features a series of secondary characters - family members, friends, collaborators and curators crowd the pages of the book, becoming part of a cast and an inseparable team for Niki.
From Tinguely to Swiss art student Rico Weber and assistant Ricardo Menon who died of AIDS in 1989 (Niki created for him the large cat Chat de Ricardo located in the Tarot Garden in Tuscany), from Marella Caracciolo Agnelli (her brothers Carlo and Nicola Caracciolo offered Niki a part of their property in Garavicchio, Tuscany, for Niki's beloved Giardino dei Tarocchi) to architect Mario Botta.
Niki's story becomes therefore a collective story about a prolific artist who remained instinctive and followed her intuitions throughout her turbulent life and who was the happiest as a child hiding in the kitchen overseen by the soothing presence of the family cook (a sort of inspiration for her Nanas), or in the kitchen she created inside The Empress in the Tarot Garden, where she shared meals and laughs with her friends.
The graphic novel closes with Niki's death in 2002 in La Jolla, California, and with her last work - Queen Califia's Magical Circle, a sun-drenched sculpture garden in Escondido - unveiled posthumously.
Yet the volume - that also offers a detailed chronology and a list of additional materials to read including Niki's Insider-Outside. World Inspired Art - does not end with death, but with a message dedicated to all readers. Art saved Niki, it rescued her from madness and from becoming a bad person, as her ghost states at the very end of the book: "What's for sure is that, if I hadn't created, I would have destroyed. Yes, I'd have made a rather fearsome terrorist!"
From her first violent assemblages, Niki journeyed safely to light-hearted, whimsical, colorful, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters and iconic female figures. Art saved her, and it could save each and everyone of us, it could even save the world. Food for thought for us all then and for the bleak, racist, violent and aggressive times in which we are living in.
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