Rainy afternoon, November 1972— Skeletal trees near the square, dripping with rain. Wearing an ankle-length paisley dress and a black wool cape sewn by my mother, I knocked on the door of the Theosophical Society Library in London. I don’t remember who suggested I go there – or even how I got the address, but one gloomy day, I rang the bell and was admitted to the inner sanctum. I stepped into a lounge where a few pale-looking older people, very conservatively dressed, were sitting on sofas, browsing through magazines. They didn’t at all look the way I expected them.
Me in my cape and shawl, hanging out in esoteric junk shops, Photo by Arthur Skinner
A woman at a desk seemed quite puzzled by my request to use the library. She deferred to an older gentleman in a worn beige sweater and gold rimmed spectacles— who after a few minutes, informed me that although the library was usually only for members, they could make an exception – because they liked me. Never had I received such a generous comment from a stranger before. It never occurred to me that someone might like me right off the bat like that.
I was shown into a huge room with many tall bookcases packed with leather-bound tomes, a midnight blue Chinese rug, a huge lacquered table, and a few comfortable arm chairs. I said I was looking for books on the Tarot, and a kindly lady brought me a couple to peruse – and thus began my romance with this archaic set of characters who point out a path of initiation and self-knowledge.
One of the books mentioned that the Correr Museum in Venice had a few 17th century cards in their print cabinet – so a few weeks later, traveling in Venice with my artist boyfriend, we stopped off at the print cabinet and I asked to see the cards. The attendant seemed rather astonished that I knew they had these cards in their collection and even their precise location numbers. They were brought to me in a manilla envelope – and just dumped out on a desk – four magnificent cards of the minor arcana – on thick pasteboard and covered with rich gold leaf. The rest of the deck had been lost. It was humbling and thrilling to think how the missing deck had been used, and in what hands it had passed, and where the missing cards might now be. Here I was holding them in my hands, and tracing the great gold ace of coins with my finger.
A few days later, I bought a deck of my own at an esoteric bookshop near Chartres cathedral and from then on became a collector and reader of tarot cards.
I bought several decks over the years, including a facsimile of the Visconti Sforza deck, which was the one I preferred, purchased in Florence at a bookstore that no longer exists.
My Visconti Sforza deck
So I became a reader of cards, and after a decade or so, simply stopped, put my cards away in a little Tibetan bag, and stopped thinking of them. I gave all the other decks away. But the Tarot and its images were always in the back of my mind.
In writing my novel,Signatures in Stone, A Bomarzo Mystery,I got the idea that the sculptures in the garden were similar to Tarot cards, that is – figures with a specific divinatory and psychological meaning. I worked out a path of eleven figures – and Sante Fe artist Carolyn Florek drew them for me. Some are based on the statues in the Park of Monsters/ Sacred Wood. The others are drawn from the story itself. The eleven tarot aracana are interwoven with the heroine’s discoveries in the garden.
Tarot: The Sphinx, Bomarzo Park of Monsters, Carolyn FlorekTarot, The Hell Mouth, Park of Monsters, Carolyn FlorekSignatures in Stone A Bomarzo Mystery, deluxe paperback edition, 2023.
Recently, asked to contribute an essay on Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden for a publication by local Tuscia historian, Mary Jane Cryan, I took the little Tibetan purse off the shelf, and opened it for the first time in over a decade. Researching Saint Phalle’s concept of the Tarot has been fascinating, because she sometimes uses traditional imagery from the classic Rider deck, and other times deviates with her own interpretation and depiction. I find I can read them more fluidly now. Keep reading to find out more about Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in my next posts. The Tarot Garden of Niki de Saint Phalle 1
After a nervous breakdown, Niki de Saint Phalle was hospitalised in a mental asylum, and subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. Despite all, the asylum proved to be a place of healing. Freed from housework and parenting duties, she wandered the grounds, feeling reconnected to nature, picking up twigs and leaves with which she made collages. When a friend brought her painting supplies, she began to paint and her condition rapidly improved. In six weeks, she was out again, traveling with her husband Harry Mathews and their daughter. They settled in Spain, and their second child was born in 1955.
American Poet Harry Mathews
In Barcelona, Saint Phalle visited Gaudi’s Park Guell for the first time. It was her meeting with a master, an experience so overwhelming that it made her tremble with a sense of destiny. “I knew someday I would make my own Garden of Joy,” she wrote.
In the asylum, Saint Phalle had been reborn as an artist, but her marriage was unraveling. At the age of thirty, she made a painful decision: to leave Harry and the children and to make a life in art, although she had no formal training and was completely self-taught. She moved to Paris, joining other artists in a makeshift studio behind the Montparnasse train station and there living rough without plumbing, she began her meteoric career. She shared a studio space with the man who would be her rival, lover, and soul mate for many years to come: Jean Tinguely.
Jean Tinguely
Sainte Phalle’s career is divided in three phases: feminist rage in which she wanted to blow things up and literally did so with her Tirs (Shooting Pictures). These wereperformances in which she fired a rifle at relief paintings where bags of paint had been concealed inside the canvas, exploding on impact. Next came the Nanas– rotund, buoyant, whimsical, female figures inspired by archaic fertility goddesses made of fiberglass and polyester resin, often accompanied by playful monsters and animals. Here the feminine is associated with fun, empowerment, freedom. Last came the phase in which sculpture morphed into architecture: monumental fountains, domes, chapels, and inhabitable structures. Saint Phalle is one of the very few women sculptors who have worked on such a vast scale. She wanted to prove that women can make monumental art just as men can.
She had dreamed of creating her garden for years, seeking the right spot, which she thought might be Africa or South America, a place that would contrast starkly to the urbanization of contemporary life. By chance or fate, the chosen spot turned out to be a former quarry in the Tuscan Maremma. The land belonged to the Caracciolo brothers, whose sister, Marella, wife of Gianni Agnelli, happened to be a close friend of Niki’s. Saint Phalle swept into Garavicchio, the Caracciolos’ village, like a whirlwind, wearing a polka dot dress and a straw hat decorated with a flock of birds. Showing them a tiny clay model of the sculptures she envisioned, she demanded, “I need a piece of your land to build a park based on the Tarot cards.” The area they selected was enclosed by rocky cliffs forming a sort of amphitheater, which had once been used by the Etruscans as a burial site.
There could have been no better place than here in Maremma, near the province of Viterbo where several of Italy’s greatest esoteric gardens are located: Villa Lante, the Sacred Grove (aka the Park of Monsters) of Bomarzo, the gardens of Villa Farnese in Caprarola. By placing her garden here, Saint Phalle had connected up with the local tradition of landscape narratives and healing gardens. In the sixteenth century mannerist tradition, those gardens were to be “read” with the heart and mind as much as they were to be enjoyed with the senses. The placement of fountains, trees, and sculptures obeyed a narrative strategy that might reveal a secret doctrine, heal an illness, enhance political power, lead the way to spiritual enlightenment, or simply alter fate. Such gardens were magic books hewn in stone, in which the visitor, while wandering about, became the actant or performer of an ever-changing story, a necessary element in the garden’s magic.
Bomarzo, the Park of MonstersVilla Lante, Another source of inspiration for Niki’s garden
For Saint Phalle, the Tarot Garden was a corner of paradise achieved through an inner itinerary of sacrifice and spiritual growth. In creating her iconography of the twenty-two arcana, the artist reinterpreted the traditional figures of the cards through her own experience and understanding. Some of the sculptures in the garden: the Devil, the Moon, Temperance, the Chariot, the Hanged Man are based on well-known illustrations found in classic Tarot decks. Others deviate from the traditional depictions to express her own vision. She wanted to capture the essence of each arcanum as she had personally experienced it.
The monumental sculptures were built by first welding a steel framework for each piece, covering it with mesh wire, and then spraying it with concrete, to create gigantic, grey, somber forms. Next the sculptures were covered with brightly colored ceramic tiles, glass, and mirror fragments. The glass mosaics were brought from Venice, and the ceramic tiles made locally, many designed and produced by the Italian ceramic sculptor, Venera Finocchiaro.
extraordinary ceramics by Venera Finocchiaro for the Tarot Garden
The first figures visitors encounter upon entering the austere enclosure is Arcanum 2, the HIGH PRIESTESS, a fantastic turquoise clown mask with open mouth, inspired by the Hell Mouth of Bomarzo, from which water cascades down a flight of stairs into a pool. On her head is mounted a second silvery face covered with mirrored tiles with a hand jutting up from the top of its head. This is Arcanum 1, the MAGUS – also known as the Alchemist.
Arcana 1 & 2
In combining the two arcana, the High Priestess and the Magus, Saint Phalle is telling us that the Magus – who represents the creative force, pure energy, play, and active intelligence—springs from the head of the High Priestess – (just as Athena sprang from the head of Zeus). She represents feminine intuition, the irrational, and the unconscious. The two principles – male-female/ intelligence-intuition/ ego-the unconscious are united in Saint Phalle’s vision. The hand of the Magus grows from his head, reaching up to connect him to the sky, but he is grounded in the Priestess below. The water flowing through her purple lips animates a wheel sculpture in the pool: the WHEEL OF FORTUNE, designed by Jean Tinguely.
In traditional Tarot imagery, water appears in three of the arcana – Temperance which shows a woman pouring water from one pitcher to another, the Star, where a woman pours water from her pitcher into a stream, and in the Moon where a scorpion crawls up out of the sea. In Saint Phalle’s vision, water – life energy – springs from the union of the High Priestess and the Magus.
The male/ female binary is further expressed in two other arcana located nearby: the EMPEROR and the EMPRESS – complex architectural structures. The Emperor, representing male energy in both its positive and negative manifestations, assumes a double form: a phallic mosaic tower topped with three gilded onion domes and a red rocket aimed at the sky. Saint Phalle said of this arcanum: “The emperor is the power of organization and aggression which has brought us science, medicine, but also weapons and war…he is the patriarch and male protector who also wishes to control and conquer.” The two vertical male structures rise from a horizontal arcade held up by twenty-two columns, each one covered with fabulous decorated ceramic and mirror tiles. Stories, poems, symbols are scribbled on the tiles.
Across from the emperor lies the EMPRESS, a gigantic Nana, envisioned by Saint Phalle as an enormous sphinx and as a black Madonna, wearing a red crown and a blue star-studded headdress. Writes Saint Phalle – “She is the Great Mother, the Queen of Heaven, Mother, Whore, Emotion, Sacred Magic, and Civilization.” She is motherhood, fecundity, fertility. Inside this fantastic structure Saint Phalle created a mirrored womb environment which she turned into a home, complete with kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, living and dining area. The bedroom was located in one of the Sphinx’s huge breasts, with the window in her nipple.
The Empress. Her nipples are windows
Saint Phalle strongly identified with her Nana figures, and the Empress was the Nana of Nanas. The artist lived in this space for eight years while working on the Garden, and it was here her team of craftsmen and artists met to discuss their daily progress. She formed close bonds with her team for whom she felt she had become a mother – living inside a mother – the Empress. At times this womb-home became confining. There were periods when she refused to leave the garden, staying mostly inside the Empress, in solitude.
Niki’s kitchen inside the Empress
It was here, safe inside the Empress-Sphinx, nurturer and maternal protectress, that she wrote her memoir Mon Secret, revealing the incest and abuse which had troubled her early years. Through the act of writing, she found a way to forgive and free herself from the past. Yet she would struggle all her life with feelings of guilt for having abandoned her children, even though she maintained a relationship with Harry and their children, including them in her life and projects.
Throughout the garden, we find a reconciliation of the male and female principles, a concept to which Saint Phalle would return in later works, such as the monumental sculpture Coming Together, in San Diego. In the Tarot Garden, Arcanum 6, the LOVERS, is rendered as Adam and Eve; while the HERMIT, Arcanum 9, is presented in both male and female versions, deviating from the traditional depiction which shows a monk or mendicant holding a lantern. Her male Hermit is a solemn figure covered in mirror tiles, with a stylized mask calling to mind both ancient Greek masks and a medieval knight’s visor. The use of mirrored tiles throughout the garden is a way to include the visitors in the sculptures by reflecting their images upon all the surfaces, so that they become part of the sculptures themselves. This is true of the Hermit, representing the search for self-knowledge.
The Hermit
The feminine hermit is the ORACLE, a mysterious figure wrapped in serpents, even her arms are serpents – suggesting the ancient rite of incubation. You can enter the Hermit and the Oracle, stand inside, listen to them, and assume their identities.
The Oracle — the feminine version of The Hermit.
STRENGTH, Arcanum 11, is another figure shaped by the artist’s personal vision. In the traditional depiction, a woman closes the jaws of a lion. In Saint Phalle’s, the lion has been replaced by the Dragon of the fairy tales she loved as a child. A princess tames the Dragon by means of an invisible leash. Other key arcana for Saint Phalle are the Hanged Man, the Sun, and the Angel of Temperance, who became her spiritual guide.
Strength — La Forza — in Niki’s interpretation & in the Rider DeckThe Moon Arcanum — Niki’s vision retains some elements of the traditional Rider deck.Death — in Niki’s version & the Rider deck
Niki de Saint Phalle personally financed and built her Tarot Garden costing at the time five million dollars, although she was helped by fellow artists, workmen, friends, local people, lovers, admirers, and enthusiasts. To raise funds for the garden, she created a perfume which became an international success. Friends also chipped in, bringing suitcases full of cash. She also created and marketed a line of Nana-shaped pool toys.
Along the way, she encountered many obstacles, including illness. Severe rheumatoid arthritis disabled her from working on the garden for long periods. She developed lung disease from using the polyester resin. She also struggled at first with the fervent opposition of local residents who objected to her project, calling her sculptures “Monsters.” When bureaucratic snares developed concerning the lack of building permits, a white knight appeared as in all fairy tales to rescue what is good and true: François Mitterand, a great admirer of Niki de Saint Phalle’s work, saved the garden from Italian red tape more than once.
Paths seem random through the Garden, and, at Saint Phalle’s request, there are no guided tours. The point of this garden is to discover it yourself, and while doing so, discover yourself. There are however two main routes to explore – one departing from the Sun takes you up a wide, easy, well-paved path. The other is harder to find. You must climb over the dragon’s tail, then follow a narrow, slippery trail. From here you encounter more directly the Moon, the Devil, and Death, with whom the artist had to come to terms. Hardship, love, enthusiasm, obsession went into making this garden, she writes. but above all, faith. “Nothing and no one could have stopped me.” “The garden is my husband, my love. It was everything to me. No sacrifice was too great for him.”
The Hanged Man who looks at life from a different perspective: the icon of the artist
Along the Via Aurelia near the exit for Capalbio — there on the scrubby Maremma hillside, a kaleidoscopic flash of color–red, green, turquoise, yellow, hot pink, bedazzles your eyes. Further on, bizarre shapes pop out from the silvery blur of olive groves as you drive by: the pointy tip of a red rocket, a huge turquoise face with stairs spilling out of its gaping mouth, a giant rooster with a spikey cockscomb corona, a sparkly tower with a bicycle wreck on the top. It looks as though some psychedelic circus with crazy carnival rides has just set up camp on the hill. Instead, it’s a monumental sculpture garden, the major oeuvre of French American artist Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) the Tarot Garden.
The Tarot Garden occupies a special place in Saint Phalle’s artistic journey. Construction first began on the project in 1979 when she was forty-nine years old, although the idea for the garden stretched all the way back to 1955. By the mid-nineteen seventies, she had already established herself as the architect of phantasmagoric, monumental sculptures, like Hon (1966), a pop art female body entered through parted thighs, housing a screening room, vending machine, and goldfish pond, weighing 6 tons, and measuring 23 meters in length or the Golem (1972), a scary climb-upon sculpture made for a children’s playground in Jerusalem.
The Tarot Garden took nearly twenty years to complete, opening to the public in 1998, when Saint Phalle was sixty-eight. Her second husband, Jean Tinguely, her artistic partner who had assisted her by welding the steel skeletons for all the structures and creating several pieces of his own for it, had already passed in 1991. Saint Phalle followed him in 2002.
The sculptures in the garden represent the twenty-two major arcana of the Tarot deck, viewed from Saint Phalle’s highly personal perspective formed over the arc of a lifetime. In the iconic figures of the Tarot cards, she found an itinerary of spiritual development, a guide to self-knowledge and wholeness. In this process, the reconciliation of male and female, the balancing of yin and yang within oneself was a primary goal. The Tarot Garden combines many influences, dreams, and visions that haunted the artist for decades and were expressed in various ways in her earlier works: her passion for fairy-tales and myths, children’s toys, monsters, explosive color, fanciful serpents, the Nanas – her signature sculptures of enormous, sassy, buxom female figures representing joy and liberation; and the idea of creating a town where women rule – Nana Town.
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Early Life & Influences
Daughter of a French aristocrat and an American heiress, Niki de Saint Phalle was born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint-Phalle in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Shortly after her birth, her parents emigrated to the United States, in the early phase of the Great Depression, leaving Niki with her grandmother in a chateau. The grandiose chateau, its stonework, secret places, coats-of-arms, and heraldic symbols made a powerful impression on her, further enhanced through the years by the stories her grandparents told her: fairy-tales, legends of knights and ladies, and the illustrious history of her ancestors. It was an environment presided over by a nurturing mother figure – her grandmother — and an enchanted place where fantasy may become real. Her hunger for magic places outside time would become a driving force in her artistic development.
At the age of three, she joined her parents in New York City, where they had settled in Manhattan on the Upper East Side. Her father helped finance what soon became the most famous restaurant in the city: Le Pavilion, where they often dined. Her mother made sure her children benefited from the city’s many cultural opportunities – museums on Sunday, where the Egyptian exhibits of the Metropolitan Museum captivated Niki; ice-skating at Rockefeller Center in the winter; summers in Connecticut or Long Island; visits to France and the family chateau.
Though this might sound ideal, Niki’s childhood and adolescence were turbulent and traumatic. Both parents were abusive. Her mother beat the children and once forced her brother to eat his own vomit. Niki’s father molested her sexually from the age of eleven on, as she would later confess in her memoir: Mon Secret. Despite all, Niki adored her sophisticated, elegant mother, and craved her good opinion, rarely granted. As an adult, Saint Phalle believed that this was the key to her success as an artist. Learning to survive emotionally without her mother’s approval made her independent and free from the judgements of others. She also resolved that she would never become her mother: counting linens in a cupboard, and obsessed with housekeeping.
Rebellious and mischievous, she did poorly at school. Strikingly beautiful, she found work as a fashion model at the age of seventeen and at eighteen escaped her nightmarish family by eloping with the writer-musician Harry Matthews. Matthews, just a year older than Niki, came from a wealthy family gravitating in the Saint Phalles’ elite circle.
The young couple adopted a Bohemian lifestyle on a shoestring budget, as Matthews’ disapproving parents withdrew their economic support. The newlyweds would sometimes shoplift books or luxury food items they couldn’t afford to buy. Niki was only twenty-one when her first child was born. Housewifely and maternal duties weighed heavy on her. Unable to deal with laundry, she just hid dirty clothes under the bed, and thought nothing of leaving their infant daughter alone at home while they went out in the evenings.
When Matthews inherited money, the couple moved to Paris, bouncing about Europe, mingling with writers, musicians, and artists. Niki took up painting and wanted to study acting. Then while in Nice, they became sexually involved with another couple: Harry with the wife and Niki with the husband: a French veteran obsessed with suicide.
The entanglement à quatre proved very stressful, leading Saint Phalle to a major breakdown during which she attacked her husband’s lover and attempted suicide. Later discovering a collection of razors and knives Saint Phalle had hidden under a mattress, Harry had her interned in an asylum in Nice.
“Why are there bars on the windows?” she asked Harry, who replied “To catch butterflies.”
“I believed him.” – she later wrote. Her treatment involved ten rounds of electroshock therapy. The doctors told Matthews that it could take up to five years for her to be cured. She sometimes dreamed of rats gnawing her body but she also dreamed about a magic garden, and that dream sustained her during her stay.
The Magic Library of Bomarzo 