“I met my destiny. I knew that I was one day meant to build my own Garden of Joy.”
French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle wrote these words in her book The Tarot Garden, describing the first time she saw Parc Güell, the whimsical site created by Antoni Gaudí in the hills above Barcelona. Full of fantastical figures covered with colorful tiles, it sparked Saint Phalle’s creative fire.
Creating her own version of Parc Güell became Saint Phalle’s obsession, one that took her decades to achieve. Today, her Tarot Garden draws art lovers from around the world, and Saint Phalle is considered “one of the most significant female artists of the 20th century.”
Who Was Niki de Saint Phalle?
She was born near Paris as Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle in 1930. Her mother was American and her father was a count, a member of the French nobility. The family moved to New York when Niki was young, where her father worked as a banker.
Saint Phalle’s childhood was traumatic, as her mother was violent and her father sexually abused her. Saint Phalle fled when she was young, marrying at the age of 18 and moving to France.
For the next ten years her young family wandered around Europe, living a bohemian lifestyle while she dabbled in art, and her husband in writing. (This time in her life was recently depicted in the French film Niki.)
But Saint Phalle’s childhood had left its scars. In 1953, at age 23, she attempted suicide and was committed to an asylum. There she found that painting helped stabilize her, and from then on art became her reason for living. She would go on to create works on the topics of gun control, women’s rights, AIDS awareness, and global warming, and become an icon of the modern art world.
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Art
Though she had no formal training, Saint Phalle was highly creative, and was a clever marketer of her work.
She first came to public attention with her Tirs (“Shootings”) series in the early 1960s. She would embed household objects in plaster, things like chairs and scissors and eggbeaters, and then attach bags of colorful paint. Using a rifle or pistol, she would shoot the bags, which burst and splashed paint all over the canvas.
These performance art pieces drew a lot of attention. It didn’t hurt that Saint Phalle was beautiful (she was even once on the cover of Vogue), and often wore a figure-flattering white jumpsuit as she shot.
In the mid-1960s Saint Phalle began creating her Nanas, large sculptures of voluptuous women. The figures were colorful, joyful, and very popular, bringing her a new level of fame. Their legacy lives on even in popular culture today, as they were recently cited as an inspiration for some of the prosthetics used in Coralie Fargeat’s hit film, The Substance.
Saint Phalle began making monumental sculptures, the first in 1966, for Moderna Museet, Stockholm’s modern art museum. She created an 82-foot-long pregnant Nana that visitors could enter through its vagina, where they found things like a theater, a fishpond, even a milk bar in one of the breasts!
A few years later, the mayor of Jerusalem invited Saint Phalle to build a sculpture for one of the city’s playgrounds. Here she created Golem, a giant monster’s head with three red tongues sticking out, for kids to slide down.
Now she was ready to start her masterpiece, the Tarot Garden.
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden
Saint Phalle envisioned an enormous park, with a giant sculpture for each of the 22 Major Arcana tarot cards. This required land and money, but, fortunately, she was friends with Marella Agnelli of the wealthy Italian Agnelli family. Marella’s brothers donated an abandoned quarry in southern Tuscany, 14 acres that Saint Phalle could use for her project.
Now that she had the land, Saint Phalle needed to find the money, and lots of it. The park would cost millions.
This is where Saint Phalle’s marketing talents came into play. She sold countless copies of her works, especially the popular Nanas, in whatever form that customers demanded. From clothing to jewelry to pool toys, colorful Nanas flooded the market. She even got into the perfume market to help bring in money, putting her name on a Niki de Saint Phalle perfume that is still sold today.
With land and money in hand, now came the moment to build her park, a process that took decades. Starting in 1978 and continuing until her death in 2002, Saint Phalle worked on the Tarot Garden, while periodically taking other commissions to raise money.
Major Works in the Tarot Garden
The first thing a visitor sees when entering the garden is the bright blue High Priestess, with the silver Magician hovering above. Water cascades down from the Priestess’s mouth into a pool where the Wheel of Fortune turns.
To the left of the High Priestess sits the garden’s most impressive sculpture, the 50-foot-tall Empress. It is so large that Saint Phalle built an apartment inside it and lived there for years. It includes a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom, plus a mirror-covered dining room where she served meals to her workers.
In a quiet corner of the garden rides Death, a remorseless Nana on a blue horse above a green sea, with arms and legs reaching out of the water towards her.
Nearby is the Devil, a grinning, winged Nana with three gold penises, flanked by two smaller Nanas.
And then there’s the Hanged Man, who dangles below serpents that look out in all directions.
There are many more colorful sculptures, some the size of buildings, like Justice, The Oracle, and The Falling Tower.
Later in The Tarot Garden, Saint Phalle reflected on her decades-long struggle to create it, writing, “As in all fairy tales, before finding the treasure, I met on my path dragons, sorcerers, magicians, and the Angel of Temperance.”
The Tarot Garden (Il Giardino dei Tarocchi) is located at 58011 Capalbio, Province of Grosseto. It is open daily from April 1 to October 15, from 2:30 – 7:30 pm. Tickets are 12 euros and should be purchased online ahead of time to ensure availability.
Where to Find Niki de Saint Phalle’s Art in the U.S.
Saint Phalle’s work can be seen in many public collections in the U.S., including Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art; New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Her sculptures can also be found in San Diego’s Waterfront Park, and on the University of California’s San Diego campus.
Keith Van Sickle splits his time between Provence and California. He is the author of the best-selling An Insider’s Guide to Provence. Read more at Life in Provence.
