Le Monde

Material

Painted polyester, steel and engine; 430 x 185 x 160 cm

Dating

1989

About the artwork

“Le Monde”, “The World” in English, is a collaboration between the two artists Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely from 1989. While de Saint Phalle shaped the female sculpture, Tinguely designed the kinetic base. “The World” is a subject, which has its origins in the Tarot card set and which had fascinated de Saint Phalle for some time.
In 1978, the artist began with the realisation of a dream, which had been captivating her for a while: de Saint Phalle wanted to build her ‘Giardino dei Tarocchi’ in Garavicchio in Tuscany – a garden adorned with sculptures, inspired by the Tarot cards of the great Arkana. Numerous similar projects by other artists, who had created their own small worlds, served as inspiration. Among them, Gaudi’s Park Güell in Barcelona had impressed her most and animated her to incorporate diverse materials and objects in her sculptures. After having visited Park Güell, de Saint Phalle said retrospectively: “On this day I became aware of my determination. It changed my life. I felt like Paul the Apostle once he saw the light! I realised, that I had to create a garden of happiness, too. A garden where people could be free and happy.” A magical garden Eventually, de Saint Phalle built a garden, which included more than 20 sculptures, some of which were monumental in size. Each figure has its own mystical background, emanating from the corresponding Tarot card. The “Giardino dei Tarocchi” was de Saint Phalle’s lifework and for some time she even lived in one of the sculptures in the garden. She helped to shape the garden until the end, though she demanded to stop all work on the project shortly before she passed away.

The work shown here, “The World”, is usually the last card in a Tarot set. De Saint Phalle realised “The World”, and all the other 21 motives on the Tarot cards, in her own particular style. One of her famous “Nanas”, veiled by a golden scarf, balances on a white egg, which represents the world. A rainbow-coloured snake emerges from the world and twines around one of the Nana’s legs, thereby connecting the three parts. The snake does not exist on the original Tarot card and the animal figures as de Saint Phalle’s personal talisman. It appears in several of her sculptures and in some cultures the snake represents a cosmic primordial energy, which enlivens the universe in circularly flowing ways. The golden scarf covers the Nana’s bi-sexuality, which otherwise, if you do not know the Tarot tradition, remains concealed. By conjoining the two antagonist sexes, the figure fulfils the Tarot’s obligation to inseparableness, as the “World”-card stands for completeness, entirety and evolvement.
“The World” is a key figure in de Saint Phalle’s eventful biography. She had noticed soon, that, as a woman, she will be a social misfit. Hence, it is no coincidence, that she sculpted mostly female figures and represented feminist views. The abuse by her father during her childhood fuelled her negative feelings towards conventional gender roles. Therefore, “The World”, which unifies the two sexes and originated from a collaboration with her second husband, Jean Tinguely, seems to have a conciliatory tone.

Jean Tinguely, who was responsible for the kinetic base of the sculpture, was one of the most important interlocutors and inspirational sources for de Saint Phalle. The couple had a deep understanding on a personal, as well as on an artistic level. That is why numerous collaborations exist. In line with his usual kinetic art, Tinguely created the base from large bent and contorted pieces of metal and inserted a motor, which lets the world rotate when pushing a button.

About the artists

Niki de Saint Phalle (born Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle, 29 October 1930 – 21 May 2002) 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.

Throughout her creative career, she collaborated with other well-known artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, composer John Cage, and architect Mario Botta, as well as dozens of less-known artists and craftspersons. For several decades, she worked especially closely with Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, who also became her second husband. In her later years, she suffered from multiple chronic health problems attributed to repeated exposure to glass fibers and petrochemical fumes from the experimental materials she had used in her pioneering artworks, but she continued to create prolifically until the end of her life.

A critic has observed that Saint Phalle’s “insistence on exuberance, emotion and sensuality, her pursuit of the figurative and her bold use of color have not endeared her to everyone in a minimalist age”. She was well known in Europe, but her work was little-seen in the US, until her final years in San Diego. Another critic said: “The French-born, American-raised artist is one of the most significant female and feminist artists of the 20th century, and one of the few to receive recognition in the male-dominated art world during her lifetime”.

Jean Tinguely (22 May 1925 – 30 August 1991) was a Swiss sculptor best known for his kinetic art sculptural machines (known officially as metamechanics) that extended the Dada tradition into the later part of the 20th century. Tinguely’s art satirized automation and the technological overproduction of material goods.

Born in Fribourg, Tinguely grew up in Basel, but moved to France in 1952 with his first wife, Swiss artist Eva Aeppli, to pursue a career in art. He belonged to the Parisian avantgarde in the mid-twentieth century and was one of the artists who signed the New Realist’s manifesto (Nouveau réalisme) in 1960.

His best-known work, a self-destroying sculpture titled Homage to New York (1960), only partially self-destructed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, although his later work, Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962), detonated successfully in front of an audience gathered in the desert outside Las Vegas.

Tinguely married fellow Swiss artist Eva Aeppli in 1951. In 1971, he married his second wife, Niki de Saint Phalle with whom he collaborated on several artistic projects, such as the Hon – en katedral or Le Cyclop.

Tinguely died in 1991 at the age of 66 years in the Bern Hospital of heart failure.