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 The demolished results, with its splattered paint liberated
through the violent act, were an apt metaphor for the
French-American artist's feminist rage and trail-blazing
imagination that was to propel her through four decades of work.
Beginning on Wednesday, the Grand Palais in Paris begins a major
retrospective of Saint Phalle, who died in San Diego in 2002
after spending her prolific career between the United States and
her birthplace of France.
Whether painter, sculptor, filmmaker or designer of public art,
Saint Phalle - who modeled for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar as a
young woman - brought both a joyful ebullience to her work at
the same time as a more radical strain of social criticism.
"Painting calmed the chaos that shook my soul," explained Saint
Phalle of her early work in the 1950s, in which she dripped
paint in the vein of Jackson Pollock onto landscapes created
from small found objects glued onto wood, whether bottle caps,
nails or plastic toys.
Born in 1930 to a banking family in the Paris suburb of Neuilly,
Saint Phalle moved to New York as an infant, modeled during her
teenage years, and returned to Paris in 1952.
Inspired by the philosophy of Simone de Beavoir's "The Second
Sex" and unafraid in the pre-feminism era to attack issues such
as patriarchy, bourgeois sensibilities and the constraining
roles of mother and wife, the young self-taught artist found
fame with her "Shootings" series, which combined performance art
with painting, sculpture and film.
The concept of the photogenic Saint Phalle shooting a rifle at
her art was radical for the time, and the 31-year-old artist was
invited to join the "Nouveau Realisme" (New Realism) movement,
the only woman in the group created by painter Yves Klein and
critic Pierre Restany.
In 1965 followed the first oversized resin and plaster women for
which Saint Phalle is today best known and in whose fantastical
undulating forms and expressive color can be seen the influence
of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi.
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These giant fleshy "Nanas" (French slang for woman) represent
powerful women who celebrated their bodies and their creativity, in
sharp contrast to the male-driven "scientific spirit that is
crushing us," said the artist, who alleged in a 1993 book that at
age 11 she was molested by her father.
Saint Phalle was one of the first artists of her time to focus on
women, and often black women, as her subject. The Nanas were part of
the feminist battle Saint Phalle was waging, but their sheer
jubilance often obscured their social message.
"It was a desire to see men smaller than these enormous women," said
Saint Phalle during one of the many taped television interviews
shown throughout the exhibit.
The artist began a series of projects for public spaces beginning in
the 1970s, including the "Stravinsky Fountain" outside Paris'
Georges Pompidou Centre in 1983.
But the Tarot Gardens in Tuscany, Italy was her most ambitious
sculpture park, representing the 22 cards in the Tarot deck and
financed by revenues from a perfume she created.
A civil rights activist who spoke out against AIDS, Saint Phalle
brought in references to Native American art and Mexican culture
into her later work before dying of pulmonary failure in 2002,
exacerbated by exposure to toxins from her art materials.
The show runs through to Feb 2, 2015.
(Editing by Mark John)
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