page_title: Niki de Saint Phalle
section_title: Nanas (1964–1973)
hierarchical_section_title: Niki de Saint Phalle / Nanas (1964–1973)
caption_attribution_description: English: Nana Gwendolyn 2 in front of the Tinguely-Museum Basel, Switzerland.
context_page_description: Niki de Saint Phalle was a French-American sculptor, painter, and filmmaker. Widely noted as one of the few female monumental sculptors, Saint Phalle was also known for her social commitment and work.
  She had a difficult and traumatic childhood and a multiply-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 large sculpture garden containing numerous works ranging up to house-sized creations. Her idiosyncratic style has been called "outsider art"; she had no formal training in art, but associated freely with many other contemporary artists, writers, and composers.
context_section_description: Saint Phalle next explored the various roles of women, in what would develop into her best-known and most prolific series of sculptures. She started making life-size dolls of women, such as brides and mothers giving birth, monsters, and large heads. Initially, they were made of soft materials, such as wool, cloth, and papier-mâché, but they soon evolved into plaster over a wire framework and plastic toys, some painted all white.
  As the series developed into larger monumental works, Saint Phalle used composite fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic (also known as FRP or GRP) decorated with multiple bright-colored acrylic or polyester paints.  She also used polyurethane foam in many of her sculptures. These innovative materials enabled the construction of colorful, large-scale sculptures with new ease and fluidity of form. Saint Phalle unknowingly used dangerous fabrication and painting processes that released glass fibers and chemicals, including styrene, epoxy, and toxic solvents.
  In 1963–64, she created a series of sculptures protesting stereotypical societal roles for women, as child bearers, devouring mothers, witches, and prostitutes. Some of her early artworks from this Bride period depicted ghostly, skeletal brides dressed in white, which have been compared to Miss Havisham, an ethereal character in Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations.
  Over time, these figures became more joyful, whimsical, colorful, and larger in scale. Inspired by a collaborative drawing with American artist Larry Rivers of his wife, her pregnant friend Clarice Price, Saint Phalle began to portray archetypal female figures with a more optimistic view of the position of women in society. The newer figures took on ecstatic dance poses and even acrobatic positions, such as handstands and cartwheels. Saint Phalle's light-hearted figures have been compared to the joyful dancers of Matisse and the sturdy female figures by Gaston Lachaise, Aristide Maillol, and Rodin.
  By 1965, she was calling her artistic expressions of the proverbial everywoman Nanas, after a French slang word that is roughly equivalent to "broad", or "chick". 
  The first of these freely-posed forms—made of papier-mâché, yarn, and cloth—were exhibited at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in Paris in September 1965. During this show, she joined a type of tombola raffle organized by the Artist's Club of New York, whereby artworks were randomly left in coin-operated luggage lockers at Pennsylvania Station, and keys were offered for $10 each.
  For this show, Iolas also published Saint Phalle's first artist book that included her handwritten text in combination with her drawings of Bananas. Encouraged by Iolas, she started a highly productive output of graphics work that accompanied her exhibitions, which included silk-screened prints, posters, books, and writings. In the years to come, she would publish multiple hand-lettered books, profusely illustrated with colorful drawings and diagrams, on topics such as AIDS prevention and various periods in her life story.
  In 1966, Saint Phalle collaborated with Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt on a temporary indoor sculpture installation, Hon – en katedral (which means "She-a-Cathedral" in Swedish), filling a large temporary gallery in the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, Sweden. During construction, Saint Phalle recruited Swiss art student Rico Weber, who had been working as a dishwasher in the museum restaurant (in the following years, he would become a vital assistant and collaborator for both Saint Phalle and Tinguely). A team of 8 people worked strenuously for 40 days, first building a frame using metal rebar, covering it with chicken wire, sheathing it with fabric attached with smelly animal glue, and then painting the inside of the enclosure black, and painting the outside in bright colors. The final structure was 82 feet (25 m) long and 30 feet (9.1 m) wide, weighing around 6 tonnes (6,000 kg).
  The outer form was a giant, reclining sculpture of a pregnant woman (a Nana), whose voluminous interior could be entered through a door-sized vaginal o
caption: Gwendolyn (1966/1990)
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "See http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Niki_de_Saint_Phalle_Gwendolyn_2.jpg", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image DateTime": "2008:11:30 14:35:11", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image Copyright": "(C) 2008 [http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Wattewyl Wikimedia user \"Wattewyl\"]; License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY-3.0)", "Image ExifOffset": "1506", "Image XPComment": "[78, 0, 97, 0, 110, 0, 97, 0, 32, 0, 34, 0, 71, 0, 119, 0, 101, 0, 110, 0, ... ]", "Image XPAuthor": "(C) 2008 Wikimedia user \"Wattewyl\": http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Wattewyl; License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC-BY-3.0)", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 51, 48, 48, 0, 0, 33, 0, 1, 0, 22, 0, ... ]", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/100", "EXIF FNumber": "37/10", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "64", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0220", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2008:11:30 14:35:11", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2008:11:30 14:35:11", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "3", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "19/5", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, auto mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "93/10", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "2032", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "56", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "2"}