Niki de Saint Phalle

First marriage and children (1949–1960)

At age 18, Saint Phalle married Harry Mathews, whom she had first met at age 11. They had a civil ceremony on 6 June 1949 in New York City Hall, and later a religious rite at the French Church of New York. Her husband's family objected to her Catholic background and cut them off financially. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Mathews studied music at Harvard University.

Their first child, Laura, was born in April 1951. In 1952, the family moved to Paris, where Harry studied conducting. Saint Phalle rejected the conservative values of her family, but found herself living a bourgeois lifestyle. The family wandered around France and Europe, living bohemian.

In Nice in 1953, after separate affairs, Saint Phalle attacked her husband's mistress and took an overdose of sleeping pills. Harry discovered a stash of knives and took her to a mental clinic, where she was treated with electroshock and insulin shock therapy. She focused on creating artwork and was discharged in six weeks. Her husband abandoned music studies and started writing his first novel.

Nanas (1964–1973)

Saint Phalle explored the roles of women in what became her best-known series of sculptures. She started making life-size dolls of women, such as brides and mothers giving birth, using soft materials like wool and papier-mâché, later evolving into plaster over wire. As the series grew, she used composite fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic decorated with bright acrylic or polyester paints. She unknowingly used dangerous processes that released airborne glass fibers and chemicals.

In 1963–64, she created sculptures protesting stereotypical roles for women. Over time, the figures became more joyful and larger. Inspired by a drawing of her pregnant friend Clarice Price Rivers, she began portraying archetypal female figures with a more optimistic view. Gwendoline (1965) was the first major sculpture in this series.

The figures took on ecstatic dance poses. By 1965, she called them Nanas, after a French slang word for 'broad' or 'chick'.

Tarot Garden (1974–1998)

In 1955, Saint Phalle visited Antoni Gaudí's Parc Güell in Barcelona, which inspired her to use diverse materials. She also visited Le Palais Idéal and Watts Towers, examples of outsider art. She decided to create a magnificent sculpture garden made by a woman.

Founding sponsors were members of the Italian Agnelli family. In 1974, she became ill with a pulmonary abscess from working with polyester and was hospitalized. She recuperated in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and reconnected with Marella Agnelli.

In 1978, Agnelli's brothers offered a parcel of their land in Tuscany for the garden's site. In 1974, she created a trio of monumental Nanas installed next to the River Leine in Hanover, Germany. City leaders received over 20,000 letters of complaint, but the figures were nicknamed 'Sophie', 'Charlotte', and 'Caroline'.

Later years (1990–2002)

In her final years, Saint Phalle suffered from emphysema, asthma, and severe arthritis, attributed to exposure to materials used in her artworks. In 1989, her former assistant Ricardo Menon died of AIDS, plunging her into depression. She created a large mosaic sculpture of a cat, Chat de Ricardo, as his cemetery headstone in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris, and placed a second copy in her Tarot Garden. In 1990, she completed Skull (Meditation Room), a room-sized skull-shaped enclosure surfaced in mosaics to memorialize the AIDS crisis.

She used bronze for the first time in a series of Egyptian gods and goddesses. In 1991, she produced a maquette for Le Temple Idéal, a place of worship welcoming all religions, but it was never constructed. In August 1991, Jean Tinguely died of a heart attack. The loss affected her deeply.

In his memory, she created her first kinetic sculptures, called Méta-Tinguelys, and a series of moving paintings called Tableaux Éclatés.

Did You Know?

• Saint Phalle's Tirs series began as 'target pictures' with painted bullseyes, and she would invite viewers to throw darts at them.
• She supported gun control despite using firearms in her Tirs series.
• Her cousin Thibaut de Saint Phalle served in the Carter administration as a director of the Export–Import Bank of the United States.