Object Pictures

Once objects had made their way into Niki de Saint Phalle's early representational painting, they soon gained a firm foothold. Around 1960, finally, the growing accumulation of found things and objects and processed leftovers took over entire sectors of the painting and changed the painter's pictorial invention in a variety of ways. Firstly, the paintings increase in three- dimensionality, becoming reliefs and occasionally protruding like objects far into the room. In addition, the traditionally pictorial is being increasingly displaced in these paintings. the paint, for instance, often appears only in large- surface backgrounds for motifs that are formed entirely out of combinations of found objects- Representations and figures are now completely eliminated from the paintings. And yet the painter does not abandon her entirely personal argumentational context in the assemblages of the early 1960s: she remains true to the image of the landscape. Most of her paintings from this time are landscapes; combination paintings in which the collected objects are subordinated to a horizontal line between the sky and the earth, or reproduce details from landscapes as seen from above. Nor does she abandon her superordinate structural intentions in the apparently non- representational sectors of the paintings of this period, working as she does with dominant horizontals, circles and segments of circles.

An additional aspect is the irony with which the painter brings the objects together. "Revolution" dating from 1960/61 communicates an extremely popular concept with positive association in this age of third world struggles for national independence. Echoes of hammers and sickles are identifiable where a spatula and a curved spring ironically paraphrase the shapes of these insignias. But even with the best intentions on the part of the interpreter, in the light of a painting over which finds of all kinds are distributed evenly, such as a headless Madonna, washers, a shoehorn, pieces of wire mesh and netting, it is impossible to find any other superordinate meaning than simply the explosion that might have atomised the objects gathered here, giving them an entirely new and different relationship between themselves. The ironic redundancy of the process puts and end to any further attempts at interpretation and refers back to the painting, only offering alogical and associative solutions to the interpreter. These are the playful relationships between an alleged programme and promises of solutions that are never kept: it remains a dream of a revolution, light and fleeting like the title of a song.

A work like "Night experiment" (around 1959) also brings together everyday objects: tools, kitchen appliances, toys, toy guns. The shapes created by the objects show right angles, circles, corrugated lines, dols, hatchings. All the objects are spread out evenly on the white horizontal area in the lower two- thirds of the painting, without any particular focal points. This contrasts with the black upper third of the painting: black and without objects, representing night, the dark and even the void. Similar proportions in paintings divided into thirds can be found in many early assemblages, such as in "Twigs and leaves" or "Two boxes", both dating from around 1960/61. Antitheses of an artistic nature run through such paintings: again and again, the fullness is contrasted with the emptiness, the objects with the colour, the structure with the surfaces. These assemblages work by contrasts, contrasting contradictory elements in order to create new indissoluble statements.

The artist herself described the development that led to the assemblages in a letter to Jean Tinguely in spring 1990. " It was around 1959, when you told me about Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp and Daniel Spoerri. ... At the same time, a large fantastic exhibition of American art was being held in Paris. For the first time I saw works by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and others. I was totally overwhelmed. In comparison with them, my paintings suddenly appeared very small. This was my first major artistic crisis. I overcame it in the same way as I would solve all my problems in the future: by metamorphosis. I began to create reliefs of imaginary landscapes using objects, I stopped painting In oils and used gouache and varnish paints. I bought toys in shops and second-hand objects on flea-markets - mainly things associated with violence such as hatchets, knives and pistols. It was fun and it was exciting. I loved this new direct way of expressing myself instead of working slowly and patiently for months on my oil paintings." (in: Pontus Hulten, Niki de Saint Phalle, Stuttgart 1992, p. 154 et seq.)

The facets of the assemblages of this period are very varied. In a series of diptyches, a dialogue principle is established between two equally large areas of the painting, with occasionally the weighting of the two areas brought together within a single frame recalling the antithetical division of the painting in the first assemblages. In particular, however, the assemblage develops into a work occupying space, the artist - as in the montages created in collaboration with Jean Tinguely - allowing them to escape from the narrow pictorial field in the form of linear wire-like or graphic movements. These works adopt as early as 1960 the special poetry (which becomes perceivable in works such as "Queen of hearts" or "Rubber glove and three of spades", both from around 1960-1961) that is also perceptible in later collaborative productions by the two artists; in the combination of the compact, almost sculptural materiality of Saint Phalle's works and the light cheerful applications with which Tinguely dematerialised his heavy metal sculptures.

Now, at the beginning of the 1960s, the objets trouves are transformed from their decorative role in the painting into a decisive semantic determination of the composition. In works such as "Le Hachoir" or "Paysage de la mort", both dating from 1960, it is the martial details (knife, revolver, meat hammer, razorblades, a doll's hand) that are the elements that carry the meaning, acting as symbols of violence and menace. Similar to representations of the crucifixion of Christ, in which the tools of the crucifixion symbolise the sacrificial death, the found objects in Niki de Saint Phalle's paintings become clear symbols of violence, duress and terror. And nevertheless they remain recognisable in their thing-ness, in their age and in the patina that results from their use. The things remain themselves, but they also begin to dance; these paintings are not simply illustrations of ideas or personal states of emotion, they are just as much paintings as warehouses of ideas.