Niki

ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH  27 APRIL 2008
 
 

The Missouri Botanical Garden's show by Franco-American sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle is a pure delight. If that sounds a little too much like what I wrote here last week about the installation of fluorescent light sculptures by Dan Flavin at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, that just means that St. Louisans have the wonderful and all too rare opportunity to experience this summer two exhibitions of art that tends to make people happy.

Not that de Saint Phalle and Flavin have all that much in common as artists — their ends and their means are too different. However, they were born within three years of each other — 1930 and 1933, respectively — and became artists at a moment when the traditional definitions of what art was were being questioned.

It was a time when artists tried to remove their hand from the work they produced. To that end Flavin assembled commercially manufactured fluorescent tubing and standard hardware without personal intervention. De Saint Phalle did something a little more flamboyant: She filled balloons with paint, attached them to canvas and then shot them with a rifle so the paint dripped down the surface. Along with being the kind of neo-dadaist prank common at the time, her action rejected the rhetoric that surrounded the supposed heroism of action painting.

As an artist, de Saint Phalle was a populist; she made works of art that aimed to ingratiate. While Flavin would undoubtedly feel that the elitist temple that is the Pulitzer Foundation would be the appropriate place for his work, de Saint Phalle would most likely feel at home mixing with the hoi polloi at the garden, children swarming over her sculptures shouting with joy.

Children love de Saint Phalle's work, and de Saint Phalle loved children. She is one of the few artists — Isamu Noguchi was another — who made work that seriously addressed children, their needs and interests. And you can see how children instinctively understand that her work is for them. They make a beeline for them, climbing and scampering all over them, leaving their parents to catch up.

Not all of the sculptures are to be climbed on. But the imagery in the exhibition, which includes 39 works, is viscerally appealing to the child within all of us. There are two goofy lions on either side of a path reminding you more of the cowardly lion from "The Wizard of Oz" than the regal felines that guard the New York Public Library. There's a similarly unfierce alligator that practically begs to be climbed on. There's a self-satisfied cat (is that redundant?) that toddlers can enter and take a nap upon if they wish. It's similar to one in the permanent collection at Laumeier Sculpture Park in Sunset Hills.

There are all kinds of marvelous figures — a fat woman riding a dolphin, a man and a woman tossing around a beach ball, a tree of serpents that spouts water and a forest of totem poles adorned with eagles, turtles and fish.

And, of course, the sculptures' colorful surfaces attract the magpie. Since the '60s, de Saint Phalle has been covering her simplified forms with mosaic-like surfaces — mirrors, rocks, patches of colored ceramic and glass shards. When the sun hits them, the sculptures deliver an easy and joyous visual pleasure. The mirrors reflect light, and the gold and silver patches glint in the sun.

De Saint Phalle was a self-taught artist, but she was culturally sophisticated. If she played at being a naïf, she also understood that she was part of an artistic tradition. In her work, especially in her "Nanas," big mid-20th century earth mothers in colorful one-piece bathing suits, she showed her debt to School of Paris masters like Picasso, Matisse and Léger. Especially Léger, the modernist for the working class, who made works that argued that even the auto mechanic and the butcher deserved the same time off for pleasurable pursuits their bosses took for granted. There are three "Nanas," installed in a pool fronting the Linnean House, that perfectly capture the joie de vivre of the great Parisian modernists.

De Saint Phalle might have made work that is easy to like but that doesn't mean that she was an airhead. Although her work is child friendly, it is also made by an adult for other adults. Her work is about fecundity and eroticism as well as the lighthearted moments of life.

De Saint Phalle's busty "Nanas," who boast of equally magnificent backsides, are fertility figures. (By the way, she had two children.) Like the famous Venus of Willendorf, they don't keep their charms to themselves. Wearing chicly decorated but skintight bathing suits, they reveal their attributes for all to see.

A second-wave feminist, de Saint Phalle was an essentialist who accepted that biology was destiny, although she wouldn't let her own biological profile hold her back in any way. Her work comes from the same place as Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party" and Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues." Such attitudes might seem dated today, but women who feel oppressed are often empowered by them. And they are still vital among many of those who fervently support Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Where there is life, there is inevitably death, a subject de Saint Phalle was not afraid to embrace. There is a (relatively) small silver skull in the Climatron surrounded by rainforest foliage that stops you in your tracks. The largest work in the exhibition, "La Cabeza," is a death's head. Sparkling, glittering in the sun, it stands opposite the entrance of the Children's Garden. Life and its promise, death and its mystery, confronting each other. And the kids love it.

 
— David Bonetti, Post-Dispatch Visual Arts Critic

 
Photo: "La Cabeza," "the skull" in Spanish, is the largest work in "Niki in the Garden." Here, Christian Massa, 4, gets his picture taken. (Elie Gardner / St. Louis Post-Dispatch)