Saint Phalle
The body of works accomplished to date by Niki de Saint Phalle is immense. Its immensity lies not only with its obvious quantity and diversity, but above all with its tremendous human impact. Her œuvre is the reflection of a fifty-year destiny pursued in the exemplary fashion of someone obeying an instinctive and visionary drive born of a deep love of life. Niki's outlook translated straightaway into the totally free rein she grants her creative faculty of imagination, a freedom of which she availed herself very early on, in order to escape the restrictions that her family, religious schooling and social status sought to impose upon her.

Marie-Agnès de Saint Phalle was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1930. Her father, the New York director of the American branch of the family bank, lost his entire fortune in the 1930 stock market crash. For her early East Coast schooling, Marie-Agnès attended an upper class convent school where, as a difficult student, she rebelled against the school's traditionalist teaching methods. She soon acquired the nickname of ((Niki)), as if to assert her emerging personality in the face of her father's machismo and her mother's classicism. Not only did the nickname stick, but it has become a lifelong nom de guerre. Indeed, Niki is just a step away from <(Nike)), the goddess of victory. As if foreordained by the Greek sculptures of this goddess, starting in 1965, Niki would design her famous black or white Nanas, a triumphant tribute to the vital energy of the women of her times, regardless of race or creed.

Hon, the monumental ((Nana)) she created in 1966 for Stockholm's Moderna Museet - in collaboration with Tinguely and Uitvedt - represents the culmination of the series. And what a bold stroke it was, to have associated two male artists with her global celebration of life in the form of a majestically imposing woman positioned to give birth! Not the first, nor the last, of Niki's feats. Her genteel upbringing made her become aware of living in a men's world, but it was not in her nature to knuckle under, as a woman, to the monopolistic power of men. Niki's undertaking to liberate herself turned into the very finality of her life.

I know few artists of her generation who have so inextricably linked together their private life and artistic œuvre. Her writings, letters, plays, books, and films constitute the best introspective evidence of what amounts to an existential fusion.

It is in the realm of the literary that the first traces of Niki's emancipative vocation can be found: she wrote poems, studied drama, sought roles as an actress. She also did some fashion modelling for Vogue and Life. At the age of eighteen, in 1948, it seemed as if she was steering her life into its definitive course by marrying a young (19), rich, and handsome beau with a passion for music: Harry Mathews . Several years and two children later, the contrast between Niki's daily life in Paris, within a circle of expatriate musicians and intellectuals, and her strong desire for independence, took its toll. Hospitalized with a serious nervous breakdown in 1953, she recovered in part thanks to painting, an activity in which she had begun to dabble some time before. This prompted her to give up acting and devote herself to painting. The gouaches and oils she painted during this period, which she signed as "Niki Mathews" until 1955, constitute a family album (portraits, self-portraits, party and beach scenes). Their expressionist facture was gradually rounded out to include anecdotic or decorative motifs, and, as of 1956, her work became more pronouncediy narrative. This was the time when monsters, animals, goddesses and little girls, castles and cathedrals began emerging, together with an increasing number of object adjunctions. By 1958, these adjuncts had accumulated into thick inclusions in plaster on wood and hardboard. Early additions in a domestic vein (buttons, string, coffee beans) were soon replaced with more organically aggressive and potentially violent objects such as pointed tools, nails, dish shards, pistols, sharpened metallic instruments. Until the end of 1960, these were worked into reliefs that looked like a mixed scattering of various sharp and threatening forms. Retrospectively, they bring to mind an inventory taken out of order, like a forewarning of what lay ahead.

The most heavily incrusted reliefs of the 1958 to 1960 period, featuring an awkward ingenuousness, seem to provide a barometric reading of the growing tension behind Niki's emancipative violence. She became separated from Harry Mathews, who had in the meantime become a writer, and, in 1960, was getting on with her life and career in an intensely active fashion. Of her suitors at the time, one lover in particular began getting on her nerves, prompting her to symbolically rid herself of him through his portrait. Using a shirt and a tie to represent his body, and a dart board for his face, she glued the entire figure onto a wood panel. She set this work on display at the Paris Musée d'Art Moderne's Salon "Comparaisons", inviting the public to throw darts at the target. Here violence was translated into the enactment of a lethal interactive game. There is a gap between this as the naive, almost childish display of telltale traces left by a radical impelling force and the interactive staging of its enactment. The missing link is irony, something Niki was to accomplish in a true stroke of genius. Of course, she was in the best of hands to do so, for in early 1961, she and Jean Tinguely had just entered each other's lives. Their incipient, all-devouring passion would, over the years, blossom into the most extraordinary intellectual complicity ever to unite an artist couple.

Yes, a stroke of genius. On 12 February 1961, Tinguely invited me, together with Jeannine de Goldschmidt, to attend Niki de Saint Phalle's first "tir" (shooting session). What an exalted - and exalting - time this was! My theory of New Realism was in full effervescence, joyfully fulfilling its basic premises. In 1960, the very year of the group's founding, the movement was irresistibly asserting itself on the Parisian arts scene: Yves Klein's "Anthropometries", Cesar's compressions, Arman's "Accumulations". The Roman "affichiste" (of the torn advertising poster "décollages") Rotella joined forces with Hains, Villeglé and Dufrêne. This extraordinary wave, so imperiously emerging, was not restricted to the banks of the Seine.