La Chambre Des Reines

(1930 - 2002)

("My work is my autobiography. It's a bond between reality and me.")

Life

Niki de Saint Phalle was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris in 1930 to Jeanne Jacqueline née Harper and André Marie Fal de Saint Phalle. Her father was one of seven brothers with a share in the family’s banking house. When the stock exchange collapsed in 1930, he lost both the business and his fortune. Niki is sent to her paternal grandparents in France where she spends the next three years.

In 1933 she rejoins her parents in the USA. She often spends her summer holidays at the Château of Filerval, owned by her maternal grandfather and built by Le Nôtre.

During her teens she was a fashion model. Photographs of her appear in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and on the cover of Life Magazine. (1949)

At eighteen, de Saint Phalle eloped with author Harry Mathews, whom she had known since the age of twelve, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. While her husband studied music at Harvard University, de Saint Phalle began to paint, experimenting with different media and styles.

De Saint Phalle rejected the staid, conservative values of her family, which dictated domestic positions for wives and particular rules of conduct. However, after marrying young and giving birth to two children, she found herself living the same bourgeois lifestyle that she had attempted to reject; the internal conflict led to her to suffer a nervous breakdown. As a form of therapy, she was encouraged to start painting.

In 1956 she meets the Swiss sculptor and painter Jean Tinguely. For her first sculpture, Niki asks Jean Tinguely to prepare an iron structure, which she covers with plaster. In 1960 de Saint Phalle divorced her husband and at the end of that same year she and Tinguely move to a house and studio, which they share together. They get married in 1971.

(Niki and Jean 1966, photograph by Jacot Klein)

Niki de Saint Phalle marriage to Jean Tinguely was one of the 20th century’s most important artistic partnerships. 

Tinguely, who died 11 years before Niki, is best known for his kinetic sculptures which are like fantasy machines depending on movement for effect. They were made from everyday objects, such as metal from abandoned machinery.

(Jean in my heart - Jean Tinguely et l'ange jaune)

On 22 May 2002 Niki de Saint Phalle died in La Jolla, California after a long serious illness, of emphysema, which she had contracted from years of inhaling toxic polyester fumes while working on her art projects. (See next page for Niki's works)

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