The Fabulous Niki de Saint Phalle Comes to Quebec

A renegade, utopian, artist extraordinaire still makes us think and smile.

N iki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) isn’t an artist many Americans know. She’s a sculptor, but don’t think Saint-Gaudens or Canova. Think fat, dancing, polyurethane, and polychromatic Nana series — “Nana” means “chick” in French — and a fantasy Italian medieval town based on Tarot cards. And then we have snake ladies, giant condoms, though she called them obelisks, to be ladylike, her perfume and furniture business, a wrenching autobiography, and shotgun art, which made her famous in the ’60s. She’s a French-born, Paris-acculturated aristocrat, but she’s American, too, having an American mother and having grown up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She’s Swiss as well.

A self-taught artist, she’s firmly set in no movement but borders on Nouveau Réalisme, the French version of Pop. Her art is fun and buoyant, sexy and dogmatic, madcap and, yes, on the edge of psycho. And she’s getting a good, uplifting survey exhibition of her late work in the 1980s and 1990s, on view until January 4, 2026, at Quebec City’s extraordinary Musée national des beaux-arts. It’s called Niki de Saint Phalle — The 1980s and 1990s: Art Unleashed. Quebec City is doing the exhibition in collaboration with Les Abattoirs Musée Frac-Occitanie in Toulouse, France.

Prepare to be entranced, submerged, and charmed. If you visit, you’ll be entering not one, unique Niki world but multiple worlds. Against and among deep violet, blue, and pink walls are eight sections from her Bestiary of the Snake Lady, an introductory gallery, to her final works done in La Jolla, Calif., in the late ’90s. Art Unleashed is part biographical and autobiographical, so we feel Saint Phalle’s dynamic presence, but it’s an art-focused show emphasizing her evolving style and her jumps from medium to medium. The Bestiary gallery serves as a good first Niki shot. It displays part of her repertoire of brightly painted, cartoony polystyrene figures, among them a bat, a spider, two kissing ducks, a yellow foot, a green hand, a hybrid bird-unicorn, a monkey, and a few iterations of Nana. Lights from the ceiling project colored snakes onto the floor.

Speaking of shots, Saint Phalle became famous in the early 1960s, at least in France, for her Tirs, or shooting paintings. She’d take a canvas or collage of children’s toys and kitchen utensils, pack it with little balloons filled with paint, and, camera rolling, wearing a trendy pantsuit, shoot the thing silly with a rifle, splattering the paint. Sometimes she’d use a miniature cannon. Voilà! A most unorthodox work of art. Saint Phalle had presence. In the ’50s, she’d been a cover model for Vogue. With fashion sense, sleek, with good WASP bones, big, blue eyes, French hauteur, a high-class vamp look, and riffing on Jasper Johns’s hot, new Target paintings, she was something new. Was she pivotal in inventing performance art and ’60s “happenings”? Very likely so.

Were her Tirs about anger or score settling or revolt? Sure. The lady gunslinger artist had already had a potboiler life. Having crazy parents, she bounced from Paris to Manhattan and Greenwich, Conn., and back to Paris, survived a strict Catholic education and a molester father, married a musician based at Harvard, had kids, and then there were suicide attempts, electroshock therapy, hyperthyroidism, divorce, fledgling days as an artist, and the start of her long affair with Jean Tinguely, the Swiss kinetic sculptor. Toss into the mix seriously intellectual path-crossing with Dali, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Yves Klein, Andy Warhol, and many others, and we’ve got Niki.

Saint Phalle’s Nana is her calling card, and though she made her first Nana in papier-mâché in 1964, it’s a recurring motif. Art Unleashed displays at least 13 versions from the ’80s and ’90s — as a fat, or zaftig, woman dancing on a throne built to look like the Egyptian god Horus; as Eve, holding Adam’s hand; as black; a balloon; the Angel of Temperance; an upside-down vase; and a lamp. Saint Phalle got the idea for Nana when she befriended the artist Larry Rivers and his very pregnant wife while staying at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan in 1962. Nana, intellectually, starts with liberation from ideals of beauty and, from there, from monotony, convention, and domesticity. The figure is direct, optimistic, and so playful that the sculpture makes us smile, and never underestimate Saint Phalle’s will to make us smile.

Nana is plump but graceful, anything but beige, sexy, not opposed to motherhood but not defined by it. Nana can be an Earth Mother, too, voluptuous but also conquering. She — a Cathedral, shown at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1966, was 82 feet long and 30 feet tall, a Nana on her back. Visitors entered through the figure’s vagina. Inside was a twelve-seat cinema and a snack bar.

There’s a section on Saint Phalle’s opus, her Tarot Garden in Capalbio on the coast in Italy’s Maremma region between Florence and Rome. It’s a 14-acre complex of hot-pink, blue, orange, and yellow figures, from Nanas to castles and towers, a bleeding heart, monsters, and the Devil himself, many house-sized, set on land once occupied by Etruscans. It was financed in part by the Agnelli family, which ran Fiat, who wanted vaguely to get involved in the art world. In the ’70s, they clicked with the international, well-connected, and exotic Saint Phalle, and she delivered — not the art world but another world entirely, drawn from the 22 representations on Tarot cards. Saint Phalle worked on it mostly in the ’80s and ’90s.

Here, the exhibition is tackling a challenge. Since The Tarot Garden, a total work of art, is in Italy and comprises dozens of sculptures, tunnels, and a garden, it can’t travel. How to evoke it? Art Unleashed does it through a topographical miniature version, lots of Saint Phalle’s models, and documentarian video made by a film crew that the museum sent to Italy. Bird’s-eye and up-close shots give as good a “you are there” experience as we’ll get. Is it as hallucinatory as the real thing? I’ve never been but I suspect that the aura from dead Etruscans and a diet of wine, melon, prosciutto, and the hot Italian sun make a big difference. Still, what the museum did is effective. So we get a sense of scale, a giant Tree of Life, with snakes for branches, is steps away. It’s about 20 feet high and based on a Tarot Garden sculpture.

Saint Phalle is intellectually and aesthetically entrepreneurial, but a girl’s gotta pay the bills. She seduced donors, for love and money but never just for money, and in the ’80s she made a fortune from her perfume business and, later, furniture and accessories. Her first scent, from 1983, was advertised as “sour, green, fruity, and intense . . . like the collision between a lime, a peach, and rattlesnake venom.” It’s magnetic, I’m told, in a bottle decorated with a Saint Phalle’s snake, named after her, and still to be had on the secondary perfume market. The exhibit includes a case on her perfume business and a gallery on her very fun furniture. Selling both made Saint Phalle her own patron. Liberating, too, was her marriage to Tinguely, which made her a Swiss citizen free from high French taxes.

Saint Phalle, like most everyone in the arts, lost close, gay friends with AIDS starting in the early ’80s. She responded through art but also through AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands, a book she wrote and illustrated, first published in English in 1986. She drew from a Swiss immunologist and AIDS specialist for medical information, but the delivery is uniquely hers and, in an AIDS gallery, introduces us to her writing style. It’s succinct and revelatory but playful, too. A bit later, Saint Phalle wrote Mon Secret, her memoir, which revealed childhood sex abuse by her father. The cover is what would become a favorite subject — a death’s-head — but Saint Phalle adds flowers sprouting from the skull. Joy can come even from disaster.

She was a very good teacher. “Use a rubber,” she wrote in her AIDS book in clean, elegant script. I can tell she was taught by nuns. Below it are drawings of two condoms, one decorated with a polychrome snake, which is not inapt, and the other with heart and mosaic motifs. Below, she wrote, “It may not be your cup of tea, but it will save lives,” filling a few of her vowels with vivid color. It’s written in the form of a letter to her son.

She wanted to deescalate, what she called “de-dramatize,” the still-taboo subject of gay sex with some of her characteristic playfulness. Her condom drawings evolved into her Obelisk series starting in the late ’80s. They vary in height from four to six feet, with a trio grouped together in the middle of the AIDS gallery. “I used to think there was a need to provoke, to attack religion, and the generals,” she wrote. “And then I understood that there is nothing more shocking than joy.”

The last gallery of Art Unleashed is by no means a dud, and that’s surprising since Saint Phalle, in her last years, had debilitating emphysema and asthma that she blamed on chemical and glass fiber fumes she inhaled in making her sculptures. She also moved to La Jolla, Calif., in 1994, and who wants to work in La Jolla? The weather’s perfect. No, in those years, Saint Phalle was a ball of fire. She had commissions all over the world. One of her Skinnies — colorful line sculptures made from tubes — opened next to San Diego’s convention center in 2001. It’s 30 feet tall and what Saint Phalle called her “ying yang” — a head, half male, half female, airy and light like San Diego’s weather but, more to the point, an integration of different parts of a persona.

Her Black Heroes polychrome sculptures from the ’90s, depicting Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, and Josephine Baker from 1999 are revelatory, but not in a good way. There’s a line separating art that’s joyful, buccaneering, and refreshing and art that’s a cliché or, worse, shlock. In her Black Heroes work, she crosses the line. Her Nanas and Tarot Garden figures are fantasies, the stuff of dreams, and both serious and playful. Black Heroes are minor things.

Her 2001 series of political lithographs — the subjects are guns, global warming, and abortion — would normally annoy, but Saint Phalle is in the beautiful La Jolla bubble. She’s an artist, a utopian, a naïf, and a product of the Upper East Side and Neuilly-sur-Seine. These works are also the most charming atrocity propaganda I’ve ever seen. They’ve got playful typefaces and shot-to-pieces slapstick figures, so it’s hard to take offense. It’s like the Muppets doing NARAL. Deeper and richer are Saint Phalle’s California Diary silkscreens from 1994, with similar looping handwriting and fun, animated figures. Her frank reactions to California have the ring of truth and the befuddlement of someone who’s both American and European. “Why are there so many crazies in paradise?” she asks. Always a timely question when it comes to the Golden State.

Also in the last gallery is a 1999 modello for her Queen Califia’s Magical Circle, the final version of which is in her only American sculpture garden, located in Escondido, near San Diego. It opened after her death in 2003, completed by her granddaughter and Saint Phalle’s assistants using her plans. It tells us that Saint Phalle was, at the end of her life, as creative as ever and responding to her new role as a Californian. Califia was the fictional queen of an ancient island called California at the time of the Amazons. Voluptuous women, rainbow colors, totem poles, and critters from indigenous mythology create an imaginary paradise. It’s much smaller than her Tarot Garden and considers not the Old World but the New, especially California, whose history, Saint Phalle would tell us, didn’t begin with the Gold Rush.

Her two grave monuments in Paris’s Montparnasse cemetery for friends who died of AIDS are fabulous but not considered in the show. One is a giant, polychromatic cat — the dead man loved his cat — and the other a soaring bird made from mirrors. The bird reflects the sky, toward which the soul flies. The mirrors stay bright and clear, free from life’s tarnish. I think there are modellos for them. They’re as original as Saint Phalle gets.

By this time, we know she’s not happy clappy nonstop. And Art Unleashed ends on an appropriately somber note with a version of the Death Head that she and Tinguely made together in 1988. It’s a giant skull made from mostly black-and-white painted polyester and a Tinguely sculpture on top, like a wig. Tinguely’s robust kinetic sculptures, mostly rusty industrial parts, and Saint Phalle’s fat, glittering, dancing chicks and mythical beasts seem far apart, but they have the same animation and oomph. Death Head, though, comes as both were stumbling and crawling toward life’s end. It’s somber but not depressing. They find panache even in a skull evoking death. Each stuck a stick in the eye of the gods of sameness and conformity. They felt their art transcended even death.

There have been lots of Saint Phalle exhibitions over the past 20 years, but the museum in Quebec City feels, probably correctly, that her late work has been trivialized as too Californian and, worse, too Disney. Art Unleashed debunks this with wonderful art and an emphasis on the child’s experience. At a dozen points in the exhibition, there’s a special children’s passage with labels and art geared to open-ended thinking and the “why” questions that children ask. This is unusual and refreshingly French. American curators rarely if ever think of a child’s experience, but they’re the future visitors. The Saint Phalle show is perfect for them. I think the interpretation for adults is first-rate, as is the arrangement of art. The curators convey Saint Phalle’s story and her work in an easy, elegant flow.

I’ll write more about Montreal’s and Quebec City’s two big art museums, both great, in a couple of weeks. Quebec City’s museum has superb galleries dedicated to Québecois contemporary art, which has a unique look and is far better than many might think. It fascinates while the art of the rest of Canada fatigues. And the Quebec City museum is in sprawling city park where the Battle of the Plains of Abraham unfolded in 1759. The spot where General Wolfe died, minutes after he learned that his British forces had whipped the French, is steps from the museum’s front door.