Tarot Garden
Niki de Saint Phalle was inspired by Bomarzo for her Tarot Garden, Giardino dei Tarocchi. Rothschilds have taken her works as the wine label. They have professional artists create their wine labels.
In the first picture, the serpent is offering Eve a bottle of Rothschild wine. It also refers to the "Niki-object."
"From the sun to the plate, taking in a sensual mouth and an outstretched hand,
Niki de Saint Phalle’s composition for Mouton is a sparkling, festive allegory of the pleasures of the table. And then, running across the painting, there is the
“Niki-object”, springing from a story as old as the world itself:
the serpent tempter. But
instead of the traditional apple,
this serpent, more wine-loving than malign, is offering Eve a bottle … of Mouton Rothschild 1997 no doubt!"
Tarot Garden (1974–1998)
In 1976, she retreated to the
Swiss Alps to refine her plans for the sculpture park.
[51] In 1977 Ricardo Menon, an Argentinian, became her assistant; he would work closely with her until 1986.
[13][78]
In 1977, she worked with the English writer
Constantin Mulgrave to design sets for
The Traveling Companion, based on a
Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, but the project was never completed.
[51] She and Mulgrave lived together for around four years, but Tinguely remained a continually reappearing presence in her life.
[24]: 101–103
In 1977, she also visited
Mexico and
New Mexico, in search of more extensive artistic inspirations.
[51]
In 1978, Saint Phalle started to lay out her sculpture garden in an abandoned
quarry in
Garavicchio,
Tuscany, about 100 kilometres (62 mi) north-west of Rome near the west coast of the Italian peninsula. The following year, sites were cleared, and foundations were established.
[73]
In 1979, she produced the first of what would become a new series of sculptures, the
Skinnies. These were flat, planar, see-through outlines of heads and figures, highlighted by patches of color. In some ways, they resembled her colorful sketches and drawings but scaled up to monumental size. The series also symbolized Saint Phalle's struggles against emphysema and illness.
[79] She continued to produce her
Nanas in addition to her new style of sculpture,
[13] and both styles of figures would appear in her
Tarot Garden project.
In 1980, Saint Phalle and her team began to build the first architectural sculpture in the garden. As the project progressed, Saint Phalle started taking lessons in the Italian language, to better communicate with local workers.
[20] The second crew member she hired was Ugo Celletti, a 50-year-old part-time
postal delivery man, who discovered a love for
mosaic work on the project.
[20][80] He would work on the project for 36 years and recruit his nephews to join in; some family members are still involved in maintaining the site.
[81][80]
She invited artist friends from Argentina, Scotland, Holland, and France to help work on the sculptures.
[20] Over time, Saint Phalle worked with dozens of people, including architects, ceramicists, ironworkers, bricklayers, painters, and mosaic artists.
[82] The materials used in the
Tarot Garden project would include steel, iron, cement, polyester, ceramic, mosaic glass, mirrors, and
polished stones (which she called "
M&M's").
[12]
The structure of the more massive sculptures was very similar to the temporary
Hon installation at the Moderna Museet in 1966, but this time the artworks were outdoors and needed to withstand the long-term weathering effects of sun and rain. The basic shape of the sculptures was established with frameworks made of welded steel
rebar. A second layer of lighter-gauge steel reinforcement bars was added, followed by two layers of
expanded metal. A specialist firm was then brought in to spray
shotcrete onto the structure. A layer of tar for waterproofing and a final layer of white cement produced a sturdy, hollow structure ready for decoration.
[73]
In 1980, she also began selling a series of polyester snake chairs, vases, and lamps.
[13] That year, she recorded her first attack of
rheumatoid arthritis, a painful disease affecting the joints of the skeleton.
[13]
In 1980–1981, she designed a colorful paint scheme for a
Piper Aerostar 602 P twin-engine airplane, which participated in the first trans-Atlantic race sponsored by the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation of Amsterdam.
[13] As an act of playful rebellion against the cigarette manufacturer sponsor, she added a "
No Smoking" sign visible on the belly of the plane (she was allergic to
tobacco smoke).
[83]
In 1981, Saint Phalle rented a small house near the
Tarot Garden and hired young people from Garavicchio to help with construction of the garden. Jean Tinguely led a Swiss team, comprising Seppi Imhoff and Rico Weber, and started welding the frames of the sculptures.
[51] The following year, Dutch artist Doc Winsen (also called "Dok van Winsen") took up the welding operations.
[13]
In 1982, Saint Phalle developed and marketed an
eponymous perfume, using the proceeds to help finance her project.
[28][27][13][84] The perfume bottle top featured a small sculpture of two intertwined snakes, one golden and the other brightly multicolored.
[85] This was one of the first of what came to be called
celebrity perfumes, using fame and name recognition to sell scented products.
[2] She may have raised as much as a third of the funds she needed for the garden in this way.
[20] She actively solicited funding from friends and acquaintances, as well as by selling her artworks.
[20]
In August 1982, Saint Phalle was honored at the Street Festival of the Arts in New York City.
[86] Later that year, Saint Phalle collaborated with Tinguely to produce the
Stravinsky Fountain, a 15-piece sculptural fountain for Igor Stravinsky Square, located next to the
Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Because of its prominent location in Paris, it would become one of the best-known collaborations between the two artists.
From 1983 until 1988 when on site,
[73] Saint Phalle lived in a small apartment built into
The Empress, a house-sized
sphinx-like sculpture in the garden. On the second level, her bedroom was inside one breast, and her kitchen was inside the other one.
[20][84] Each of these two rooms had a single recessed circular window, appearing as an
inverted nipple when viewed from the outside.
[87] In 2000, she would recall: "At last, my lifelong wish to live inside a sculpture was going to be granted: a space entirely made out of undulating curves ... I wanted to invent a new mother, a mother goddess, and be reborn within its form ... I would sleep in one breast. In the other, I would put my kitchen".
[47]
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