The Skin of the Paintings

Almost all the assemblages of the early 1960s retain the colour and dimensionality of the objects, finds and particles, embedded in a base material, above all gypsum, serving as a white or coloured carrier layer and as an area of colour around the objects. A number of dramatic stages in the works of Niki de Saint Phalle were necessary before the objects on the pictures could gradually sink, be submersed and disappear in the carrier layer of white gypsum.

The assemblages were gradually revealing a different approach to reality, violence and Eros. " I began to allow my aggression to flow into my art. I created objects of death and devastation. One contained the pistol that I had bought in order to kill my lover symbolically. The moon in these paintings was always black and bore traces of violence. Indeed, I was in the process of descending into hell." (Hulten 157) The long suppressed disputes with her family, her father, childhood and her unadmitted dark secrets were finally given expression in simple and shocking pictorial inventions. The works of art were increasingly becoming the representatives for what had been done to her. In the pictures she exorcised what she was otherwise unable to deal with.

"One day in spring 1961 I visited the "Comparison" exhibition in Paris, where one of my reliefs was being exhibited. It was called " Portrait of my lover", and had a target for a head, with a man's shirt and a tie glued onto a background painted black. On a table were darts that the visitors were supposed to threw at the man's head. I was excited to see how the viewers threw the darts and thus became part of my sculpture. Not very far from my work hung a completely white plaster relief by an artist called Bram Bogart. I looked at it - FLASH - what would happen if my paintings could bleed like humans, could be injured. The painting became for me a person with feelings and senses.

What would happen if there was paint under the plaster? I told Jean Tinguely about this vision and my desire to make a painting bleed by shooting at it. ... There was still some plaster left over. In the Impasse Ronsin we found an old board and bought some paint in the nearest shop. We hammered nails into the wood so that the plaster had something to stick to. I went wild and filled plastic bags not only with paint but also with anything that was laying around - including spaghetti and eggs. ...

The bloodbath in red, yellow and blue splashed onto the pure white relief. The picture became a tabernacle of death and resurrection. I was shooting at myself, at society with its injustices. I shot at my own violence and the violence of the age. By shooting at my own violence, I was no longer obliged to drag it around with me like a burden. During the years when I was shooting, I was not ill for a single day. It was a wonderful therapy for me. The ritual of painting a relief in virginal white again and again was very important for me. I was electrified by the theatrical nature of the whole performance." (Letter to Pontus Hulten, in: Hulten, p. 161 et seq).

Where the assemblages had previously worked with open surfaces and structures, they now began to withdraw behind a surface that covered everything evenly. The white of the unshot paintings and reliefs was later to lead directly to the paintings and sculptures of women, brides, heads and finally the Nanas and their colourful surfaces. The white of the gypsum and - for instance in the brides - the white that covered the accumulation of objects gave the reliefs substance and volume. The white skin that covered them was the image of intactness, of purity and of wholeness. Their destruction, however, was a necessary phase, limited in time, of a symbolic attack on violence in the age, In society, in one's self.

The aspect of virginal intactness, which is easy to associate with white in western culture, was, however, like that of purity not just due to the colour white but also due to the covering skin over the pictures. And at the same time the pure white in the shooting pictures, the gentle skin, became the carrier of its own destruction; the paint that ran over the surface as it was shot up, running over the white, revealing and retaining even the finest contrasts and traces - it was this that turned the white relief waiting silently into a speaking structure, a moving image, a readable and stimulating surface.

Perhaps the works of Niki de Saint Phalle only grew a skin when it became necessary to give the objects a homogenous form. The skin had to grow on the pictures so that it could be destroyed repeatedly in order to describe the truth. The sacrifice of the paintings made them martyrs, at the same time, the victim also identified the perpetrator. This insoluble duality of aggression is already clearly embodied in "Saint S6bastlen or Portrait of my lover".