Niki de Saint Phalle
Shot at her own paintings with a rifle, then spent thirty years making enormous joyful women.
Niki de Saint Phalle was born near Paris in 1930 into a banking family, was a Vogue model at eighteen, and began painting after a breakdown in her twenties; she wrote later, and publicly, about being sexually abused by her father. The Tirs of 1961 were plaster reliefs packed with bags of paint, which she shot with a rifle in front of an audience so the work bled. From 1965 came the Nanas — vast, brilliantly painted dancing female figures — and then the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, twenty years of monumental mosaic sculpture. She died in 2002, her lungs damaged by decades of polyester fumes.
The Nanas exist across an enormous range: unique large works, editioned sculptures in polyester and painted resin, and small serially produced figures, so identifying edition, material, size and date is the substance of any valuation. Polyester resin from the 1960s and 1970s is unstable, yellows and cracks, and the painted surfaces fade — condition is a real issue and restoration is common. Later bronze and mosaic editions are more robust. The Niki Charitable Art Foundation holds the archive. Prints and works on paper are plentiful.
If you own a work by Niki de Saint Phalle
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.