Controversial feminist at MoMa
An iconic feminist and celebrated art avant-gardist is right now in focus on Museum of Modern Arts in New York. Niki de Saint Phalle: ”Structures for Life”, a retrospective exhibition, shows a number of her controversial sculptures.
Sant Phalle is described as having had two chief phases: Feminist rage when she painted using a gun and another with a feminist celebration of womanhood making huge sculptures that some found ugly, others liberating and moralists said they were vulgar.
The French artist was born in 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine and died 2002 in San Diego, USA. She was self-taught and started her career as a model but came to be a vocal critic of the male dominated society. In Europe, one of her permanent “exhibitions” is a sculpture park in Toscana called Giardino dei Tarocchi with 22 sculptures from figures in a tarot deck of cards.
1960 she made her first gun paintings by shooting at paint bags hidden into sculptures. The bags exploded and the sculptures were bleeding. For the shootings, she dressed up in white pantsuit looking like a cartoon heroin. The paintings were very controversial and she also made them like altarpieces mocking the church.
Her womanhood celebrating phase included for instance a sculpture of a woman the size of a gallery room and visitors could enter into the body where there was a milk bar, a pond with gold fishes and a small cinema showing Greta Garbo’s first movie.
Sant Phalle was one of the artists in a legendary mid-1960s group exhibition of avant-gardists at Museum of Modern Arts. And now, she’s back!
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