Niki de saint phalle biography of george
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Niki de Saint Phalle
French plastician, painter and sculptor
Niki de Saint Phalle (French:[nikid(ə)sɛ̃fal]; born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle;[1] 29 October &#;&#; 21 May ) was a French[5][6]sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and author of colorful hand-illustrated books. Widely noted as one of the few female monumental sculptors,[7] Saint Phalle was also known for her social commitment and work.[8][9]
She had a difficult and traumatic childhood and a much-disrupted education, which she wrote about many decades later. After an early marriage and two children, she began creating art in a naïve, experimental style. She first received worldwide attention for angry, violent assemblages which had been shot by firearms. These evolved into Nanas, light-hearted, whimsical, colorful, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters, and female figures. Her most comprehensive work was the Tarot Garden, a l
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Niki de Saint Phalle was born on October 29, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris. Her father was Count André-Marie Fal de Saint Phalle (–), a French banker, and her mother was an American, named Jeanne Jacqueline Harper (–). She had four siblings, and a double first cousin was French novelist Thérèse de Saint Phalle (Baroness Jehan de Drouas).
After being wiped out financially during the Great Depression, the family moved from France to the United States in , where her father worked as manager of the American branch of the Saint Phalle family's bank. Saint Phalle enrolled at the prestigious Brearley School in New York City but was dismissed for painting red fig leaves on the school's statuary.
She went on to attend Oldfields School in Glencoe, Maryland, where she graduated in During her teenaged years, Saint Phalle was a fashion model; at the age of eighteen, she appeared on the cover of Life (26 September ) and, three years later, on the November cover of F • Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle, an unlikely art provocateur and descendant of the thirteenth oldest family in France, was born at a chateau nära Paris in She arrived in New York City as a toddler, grew up as bilingual “Niki” on Park Avenue, summered on Long Island, was kicked out of several schools and was slated to become a debutante. But she defied that role, among many others. As her ticket to freedom, teenage Niki eloped in with Harry Mathews, a nineteen- year-old from a wealthy Princeton family. Her first defiant act as a newlywed was fashion-related; forced into a second, proper wedding in a church by her mother, she wore a short blue satin dress instead of a traditional white gown. The bride and groom were both financially cut off by their families, and the newly impoverished couple resorted to stealing the luxuries (books and gourmet food) that they couldn’t afford. But Niki didn’t hold a g
Late Artist Niki de Saint Phalle Gets Her First Major American Survey