Viva Niki ‑The Spirit of Niki de Saint Phalle

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.
Unpublished stills and recent footage shot in Europe, America, and Japan, recall the life and legacy of Niki de Saint Phalle, whose portraits and artworks japanese director Michiko Matsumoto photographed from 1981. Told with an artist’s eye, the documentary introduces in intimate detail such masterworks as the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, Italy, a vast collection of large-scale works more than 20 years in the making.

Director’s statement:
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 her in 1981 when I visited her home, a former country inn south of Paris. As the door to the stone building opened, there stood before me a svelte woman smiling brightly. In contrast to her dynamic works Niki herself was sylphlike, and radiated an aura of delicate mystery.?

As a photographer I had followed the women’s liberation movement in 1970s in Japan, Europe, and United States. And I had published the photography book ​‘Women Come Alive’. In the early 1980’s, I started to take portrait photographs of women artists in various countries. My personal quest to portrait led me to Niki’s door.

My plan was to have Niki sit for 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 Niki’s 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. 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 1963 and 1964, 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 as well as creating 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 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. Her 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 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 had published a book of photography on Niki in 1986, and had some exhibitions of Niki’s portraits. A few years ago as I approached my seventies, my thoughts turned to things I had not yet accomplished. 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 could film ​‘The Three Nanas’ in Hannover, ​‘The Dragon’ in
Belgium, ​‘Stravinsky Fountain’ in Paris, ​’The Tarot Garden’ in Italy and some of Niki’s final projects in San Diego and in Hannover.

And I also had great encounter of interviewees including her great-grand daughter, her gallerist, curator of her retrospective, 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. Each time we meet her there still, she shows us the joy of uninhibited creative expression, indeed the joy of life itself.

I would like to share Niki’s lifelong message through this film.
- Michiko Matsumoto