Director’s Statement VIVA NIKI ― The Spirit of Niki de Saint Phalle

Director’s Statement
VIVA NIKI ― The Spirit of Niki de Saint Phalle
 
Michiko Matsumoto
January 2023
 
The late French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle is remembered today for her Nanas, a highly spirited force of colorful female sculptures. These figures, as with all of Niki’s works, possess an unbridled creativity that hums with the very energy of life.
 
I first met Niki in 1981 when I visited her home, a former country inn south of Paris. As the door to the stone building opened, there she stood before me, sylphlike and smiling brightly. In contrast to her bold, dynamic works Niki radiated an aura of delicate mystery.
 
As a photographer I had followed the women’s liberation movement in Japan, Europe, and the United States in the 1970s, and had published the photography book Women Come Alive. In the early 1980s, I embarked on a personal quest to take portrait photographs of influential women artists in various countries. This is what had led me to Niki’s door.
 
My plan was to take only a single portrait, but as Niki spoke of her ideas for the Tarot Garden, I became so intrigued by the vast scale and playfulness of her world that I went on to follow her work for more than a decade, in locations across Europe.
 
For Niki the voluptuous Nanas were the epitome of joyful, liberated women. But they were preceded by a period when her art was filled with fury. Her Shooting Paintings of the early 1960s were angry performance works of protest against oppression in all of its guises, political or personal. These she created by firing rifle shots at complex assemblages of wood and plaster into which she had embedded spray cans and bags of paint. Later, in 1964 and 1965, she created figurative reliefs denouncing society’s assignation of roles to women.
 
From the mid-sixties onward, Niki’s sculptures of women began to fill out in shape, showing softened, curvier contours as well as brighter colors. Her heroic Nanas had arrived.
 
Over the years Niki’s Nanas grew larger, and she also took on architectural commissions—sculpture parks, children’s playhouses, and kinetic works such as the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris.
 
The culmination of her architectural work is the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, Italy, two decades in the making. Niki was in her twenties when she first encountered the work of Antoni Gaudí. Inspired especially by the emblematic spaces of his Park Güell in Barcelona, she dreamed of one day creating her own sculpture garden, something that would last 100, even 200 years.
 
The Tarot Garden is based on the 22 Major Arcana cards of the tarot deck. Niki’s vision was to create a place where people could walk through and linger among the tales suggested by these archetypal figures of human experience.
 
When I visited the Tarot Garden in 1985, Niki had moved into her sculpture of The Empress, which served as her studio and home during a period of intense work to complete the garden. One of its voluptuous breasts was her bedroom—she slept cradled in the very bosom of the divine feminine!
 
I published a book of photography on Niki in 1986, and had exhibited some of her portraits from time to time. A few years ago my thoughts turned to things I had not yet accomplished over the course of my career. High on my list was seeing the Tarot Garden in its final stage of completion. That desire led, in part, to the making of this film.
 
I was able to film the Tarot Garden and some of Niki’s final projects in San Diego and in Hannover. And I also had the great opportunity to interview many individuals who were close to Niki, including her great-granddaughter, her gallerist, the curator of her Grand Palais retrospective, a collector, and her granddaughter, who is now a trustee of the Niki Charitable Art Foundation.
 
Throughout her lifetime, Niki’s indomitable spirit and freewheeling artistry invited us into the vast and vibrant space her soul inhabited. Still today, each time we meet her there she shows us the joy of uninhibited creative expression, indeed the joy of life itself.
 
It is my sincere desire that Niki’s timeless message will reach an ever wider audience through this film.
 
Translated from Japanese by Wendy Uchimura and Susan Rogers Chikuba
©Artwork by Niki de Saint Phalle
©Text & Photographs by Michiko Matsumoto   All rights reserved.