Niki de Saint Phalle valuation
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.
What a work by Niki de Saint Phalle is worth
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Bio
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.
At a glance
- Born
- 29 October 1930, Neuilly-sur-Seine
- Died
- 21 May 2002, La Jolla
- Movements
- Feminist art, Nouveau Réalisme
More on Wikipedia.
Public works and the two great gifts
Her public works include the Stravinsky Fountain beside the Centre Pompidou in Paris, made with her husband Jean Tinguely in 1983, and the Tarot Garden at Garavicchio in southern Tuscany, which she began in the late 1970s and opened to the public in 1998.
Late in life she gave much of her own collection away: more than four hundred works to the Sprengel Museum in Hanover in 2000, and 190 to the city of Nice in 2001, now at the MAMAC there, prints among them as well as paintings and sculpture. Those collections and the Niki Charitable Art Foundation's archive are the reference points for identifying a work and its edition.
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.
