Menil’s Niki de Saint Phalle exhibit documents a career of resistance
Work of self-taught artist evolved from rage and burden to celebration and joy
Acoterie of Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nanas sits on a platform in various poses, while one dangles from above. The Nanas came to be in the mid-1960s at a time when Saint Phalle put down her rifle and took a different tact in making art in response to patriarchal constructs. With her Nanas — mixed-media sculptural pieces — she trumpeted the female form. Her Nanas are voluptuous, legs often covered in hearts and spread wide.
The dangling Nana, “Samuela II” from 1965, caught my attention in particular. The figure’s position resembles that of Atlas: one knee bent to the ground, the other making progress in helping the outstretched arms lift some unseen burden. But shift some 45degrees to the left, and the shadow of “Samuela II” becomes visible. It appears lifted in some sort of euphoric dance.
Juxtapositions of burden and celebration, rage and joy, run throughout “Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s,” an exhibition at the Menil Collection that serves as fascinating documentation of an artist circling a few themes across a decade with strikingly different results. Saint Phalle was born in France in 1930 and raised in New York, though she split much of her life on both sides of the Atlantic. She worked as a model, and she was a self-taught artist. She rebelled against a religious upbringing, and she found herself a wife at 18 and a mother soon after. Hers was largely a self-taught path into making art. But once in the slipstream of creating, she quickly set about becoming her own vessel cutting her own path, which is where the Menil’s exhibition picks up the story.
Saint Phalle’s works here fall under the category of resistance, but from the violence of the
earliest works in the decade to the celebration in the last, her approach evolves dramatically in that span. Curated by
Michelle White,
senior curator at the Menil Collection, and Jill Dawsey, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, “Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s” opens with works as subtle as hatchet wounds. The earliest pieces — representations of cathedrals — are her filed grievances with the Catholicism of her upbringing. Then the show’s path leads to another room, where “Tir Séance, 26 June 1961” looms.
Comprising plaster, metal, acrylic and other objects on wood, this “Tir Séance” isn’t a gentle introduction to her Tir works, their name a French term for “shooting” or “shelling.” But perhaps that’s for the best. The piece is nearly 11 feet tall and bursts with points of attraction. It is among those Saint Phalle decorated, for lack of a better word, with a .22 caliber rifle, which not only left wounds in the works but also ruptured pre-placed vessels containing paint. The metal frame and the splashes of color lend “Tir Séance” an austere gravity. But those elements almost feel like a challenge: Turn away, if you choose, but there are more intricate rewards if you lean in. Stepping close to the work and then moving back, I saw other elements — found materials grafted into the work — that hardly felt random. A few circular twists of wire took on the maternal metaphor of the nest. On the opposite side of the piece, was an autoharp, an antiquated piece of musical machinery that has no inherent feminine implications, though so many of its best-known practitioners in American folk music were women.
And a basin in the piece, with twisting tubing spilling from the bottom, could have had other implications. But within this framework, I thought of a nowrenowned and brilliant piece of dialogue from TV’s “Fleabag,” in
which a character played by Kristin Scott Thomas discusses pain. “Women are born with pain built in,” she says. “It’s our physical destiny — period pains, sore boobs, childbirth.” The rest of the passage is worthy of inclusion, but better to just watch the scene (or the show).
But after this séance with “Séance” that dialogue stuck in my head. The early part of the exhibition displays Saint Phalle fighting back vigorously against patriarchy. She wasn’t insulated: Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were peers and friends and collaborators. But she was the only woman welcomed in the Nouveaux Realistes in Paris. An environment of such otherness will inevitably
prompt sharp reflection.
So the early works are full of bullet holes and monsters, Saint Phalle’s presentation of womanhood in the era. Little touches — plastic planes and bombs attached to canvases — speak to the atomic age anxiety, but her work pulls anxieties of the age closer. The angry woman — a pterodactyl here, a T. rex there — are presented as grand threats with great vulnerabilities. The dinosaur in “Gorgo in New York” is imposing on first glance. Look longer, and the roller skates beneath its feet become evident, a touch of humor with greater resonance.
Superficially, the passage from the Tir pieces to the Nanas is akin to watching Dorothy emerging in Oz, where the presentation shifts from black and white to color. There’s a bit of a transition period where Saint Phalle’s sculptures mill about the grotesque, including a downcast bride and a Marilyn Monroe piece, both of which look like faded pieces of once resplendent Mardi Gras floats: characters worn out by expectations.
But the Nanas lend the exhibition a lift. The series came to be because of a Saint Phalle friend who was pregnant in the mid’60s. The Nanas arrive in various poses, and they do not cross their legs in public. They circle the gallery around “Madame, or Green Nana With Black Bag,” from 1968, a green sun of a piece around which the room’s other works orbit. She’s a marvel, with pronounced chest and hips but also dramatically squared shoulders contrasting her tiny hands and little hand bag. She can carry any burden put upon her.
Coursing through the exhibition, the themes are consistent, but Saint Phalle’s responses evolve so sharply. Her response to patriarchal constructs and actions was initially violent rebellion. As she moved through her 30s, she pulled inward and used celebration as her weapon
rather than a rifle as an outward expression. It proves to be a more remarkable tool.
Saint Phalle had a long relationship with Dominique and John de Menil, who were early collectors of her work. Their interest in her work and their correspondence with Saint Phalle populate the exhibition’s final room, which is full of pieces that speak to process and thought. And if anyone thinks the rifle is mightier than the body, they should ponder “Hon,” a monumental sculpture she created for the Moderna Museet of Stockholm in 1966. A temporary sculpture, it no longer exists, but a study for it is included in the Menil’s exhibition.
Also included is a giant photograph of the piece, a blackand-white image that Saint Phalle painted over, restoring its bright colors. A female form 80 feet long and 30 feet wide, “Hon” welcomed guests via her vulva, where they could walk around and consider what goes on inside our vessels. The insides of “Hon” were painted black, contrasting the vibrant colors outside, a decision by the artist to provoke thought about joy and radiance and also pain and things kept inside.