In Italy, near the coast where Tuscany meets Lazio, a gathering of sparkling mosaics protrudes through the treetops on the hills surrounding the village of Capalbio. A pink and blue sphinx with long hair, a crown, and kaleidoscopic breasts; a striped figure holding a pair of scales; and a silver-headed being with a second face for a torso (its mouth appearing to spill water down a flight of stairs into a pool) stand within a landscape of tarot-inspired characters and forms at Il Giardino dei Tarocchi—the Tarot Garden. Over a period of more than twenty years, artist Niki de Saint Phalle brought the garden into being, residing for a time within the house-sized sphinx and sleeping in one of its breasts.
The idea for the garden came to Saint Phalle in a dream years earlier while locked in an asylum; she was twenty-two and had been admitted after attacking her husband’s mistress and swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills. Told her stay could last five years, she was released after six weeks and ten rounds of electroshock therapy—an early departure Saint Phalle attributed to the time she spent making art.
Born into a French aristocratic family in 1930, Saint Phalle was raised in New York from the age of three. Following a fraught childhood, Saint Phalle worked as a model and married her first husband, Harry Mathews, at eighteen after they bumped into each other on a train following a meeting on the pre-debutante circuit. They soon had a daughter, and Saint Phalle felt stifled by the expectations of being a mother—that parenting was not only what she should long for but also primarily her responsibility. In her autobiography Traces, Saint Phalle writes: “I could not identify with Mother, our grandmothers, our aunts, or Mother’s friends. Their territory seemed too restrictive for my taste. . . . I want[ed] the world that belonged to men. . . . Very early I got the message that men had the power and I wanted it. Yes, I would steal their fire from them. I would not accept the boundaries that Mother tried to impose on my life because I was a woman.”
In her book Harry and Me, Saint Phalle recalls a remark from the artist Joan Mitchell during a vacation in France. “So you’re one of those writer’s wives that paint,” Mitchell said, a comment that struck Saint Phalle “as though an arrow pierced a sensitive part of my soul.” She pursued her art with renewed conviction and a determination to impose herself on the world, establishing new studios and moving the family to wherever made sense for her art until she separated from Mathews during a trip in 1960 and withdrew from family life.
She became known for her “shooting paintings” and the “Nanas,” large-scale sculptures of bright female dancers with small heads and exaggerated bodies, which she re-created as inflatable pool toys and sold in efforts to fundraise for the Tarot Garden. She started a relationship with artist Jean Tinguely, whom she had met with Mathews when she rented a studio in Paris. He, too, was married but in an arrangement that allowed for live-in lovers and extramarital affairs, and the rebellious pair struck up a relationship, which became an unconventional marriage. Theirs was an agreement to fidelity in life and art—collaborating, supporting, and protecting each other throughout their time together and after Tinguely’s death—rather than one of sexual exclusivity.
They worked on the Tarot Garden together. Tinguely built the iron frames of each figure—one for each of the twenty-two tarot cards of the major arcana—that populates the fourteen-acre piece of land given to Saint Phalle by a friend connected to a Neapolitan dynasty. Along with the sale of the “Nanas” pool toys and a Saint Phalle–designed cobalt-blue perfume bottle topped by a snake, Tinguely regularly topped up the garden fund with suitcases filled with cash.
The Tarot Garden was something of an obsession for Saint Phalle, and she continued working even after developing lung problems and rheumatoid arthritis, which were exacerbated by fumes, dust, and the cold rooms she inhabited in the breasts of the sphinx. She became increasingly weak, losing weight and struggling to work with her hands as they became “deformed.” But Saint Phalle forged ahead, considering the Tarot Garden her life’s work: “I’m following a course that was chosen for me, following a pressing need to show that a woman can work on a monumental scale.”
Billie Muraben is a London-based design and culture writer, and editor of Ton magazine.
