In yesterday's post, we looked at a work from the Marcel Lehmann-Lefranc Collection, currently featured in Sotheby's "Contemporary Discoveries" sale. Among the striking pieces in the auction there is also Niki de Saint Phalle's "Tir (Old Master)" (1961), a visceral and performative exploration of destruction as creation.
This piece belongs to her renowned Tirs series, in which de Saint Phalle orchestrated a radical reimagining of the canvas. Constructing layered assemblages of found objects and toys, she would create plaster reliefs. She then enacted a dramatic intervention by firing a .22 Long Rifle at the work itself. The bullets punctured hidden capsules of paint, triggering controlled explosions that released bold, cascading colors across the surface.
Through her Tirs, de Saint Phalle didn't merely paint, but staged a confrontation, transforming destruction into a means of artistic genesis. Rather than extending beyond the canvas like Lucio Fontana, she pierced it, unveiling the latent energy behind the surface, allowing it to spill forward in an unrestrained, almost theatrical spectacle of movement and texture. By inviting spectators to take part in the shooting, she also dissolved the boundary between artist, artwork, and audience, turning passive viewers into active participants in the creative act.
Violence and beauty coexisted in this ritualistic performance. The eruptions of paint, often in vivid, electrifying hues, spilled onto the composition like raw emotion, almost as if the painting itself could bleed. The work featured in Sotheby's sale is particularly striking, bearing visible bullet wounds and rivulets of color that testify to the charged moment of its making. For de Saint Phalle, this act was not just aesthetic but deeply political and personal as each shot fired became both an act of rebellion and a brushstroke of liberation.
"By shooting at myself, I was shooting at society and its injustices. By shooting at my own violence, I was shooting at the violence of the era," she stated about the process behind her Tirs.
That sense of rawness, of a surface being pierced, or torn and peeled away to reveal the colors beneath, has long resonated beyond art, finding its way into fashion, particularly in ripped designs.
In 1938, almost as if anticipating the destruction to come, Elsa Schiaparelli, in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, created an evening gown that transformed this concept into surreal couture. The dress featured a trompe-l'oeil print of jagged, torn fabric, with a black "tongue" seemingly peeling back to reveal a layer of pink underneath.
Originally crafted in pale blue silk crêpe (now faded to an off-white) the gown was accompanied by a flowing veil and striking pink gloves designed to mimic exposed flesh. A surreal paradox emerged: the gloves appeared like skin, yet they protected it. The accompanying headscarf, genuinely torn, unveiled a flash of Schiaparelli's signature shocking pink beneath. Echoing the haunting imagery in Dalí's Three Young Surrealist Women (1936), the trompe-l'oeil tears on Schiap's dress evoked flayed skin, both unsettling and undeniably beautiful.
Fashion has continued to revisit this motif, exploring destruction as a form of artistic expression. In a previous post, we examined the theme of torn and shredded designs, mentioning Viktor & Rolf’s Spring/Summer 2024 Haute Couture collection.
More recently, Jason Wu's Autumn/Winter 2025 collection revisited this aesthetic in two dresses one in deep blood red, the other in a delicate nude beige. Like Schiaparelli's high-contrast design, these dresses featured laser-cut details that curled and peeled away from the fabric, revealing the layers underneath. Through them the designer embraced imperfection, a theme he also tackled in the same collection through raw seams and exposed darts turned into decorative elements.
The two "torn" gowns, felt like relics, garments left to decay in an attic, only to be rediscovered and worn again (other designs in this collection reflected this philosophy, or this connection with the past as well; for example, inspired by his own archives, Wu digitally photographed both sides of a flat-laid vintage dress, and then replicated the images into a jacquard fabric).
Beyond their visual appeal, designs with torn elements carry certain symbolisms: usually the tears are not merely wounds, but rips and shreds tell stories of strength and endurance, they are marks of survival, defiance, and evoke the raw poetry of imperfection and the beauty found in flaws.
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