The Tarot Garden of Niki De Saint Phalle. 2

The Birth of the Garden — from Hell to Paradise.

Please read part 1 for Niki’s early life, turbulent youth, and influences

Read also My Romance with Tarot

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 were performances 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 Monsters

Villa 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 Deck

The 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

The Tarot Garden of Niki De Saint Phalle. 1

THE TAROT GARDEN OF NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE

Please read the intro My Romance With Tarot

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. 

Niki de Saint Phalle in one of her fabulous hats

Winter Day in Tuscia

Winter comes early to the Cimini Hills, these mist-swathed ridges rising inland north of Rome. Once an obligatory stop along the old pilgrim’s route to the Holy City, a midpoint between Tuscany and Umbria, this area, the  Tuscia, lies off the beaten track today.  Its  villages — Vitorchiano, Soriano, Vignanello,  San Martino, all chiseled from volcanic rock, resemble rough lacework hewn in stone. Overhanging verdant canyons, tucked away on wooded slopes, these tiny towns are mentioned in few guidebooks.

            Outsiders stumbling upon my village stare up at its stalwart medieval walls, wondering  how people in the 21^st century  manage to live in such places.

Although these houses and towers may look picturesque, it’s backbreaking work that makes this village thrive: quarrying stone, felling trees, reconstructing houses  — the harvesting of grapes, olives, chestnuts, and hazelnuts from these hills.  But now in winter the frenetic activity of autumn has ceased.  The mosto fermenting in casks has been laid to rest in cellars which were once Etruscan tombs.  All the olives have been pressed for oil and the olive press has shut down till next year. Mushrooms and fennel have been set to dry in baskets on stove tops. Branches laden with persimmons and pomegranates have been hung from the ceiling beams in the kitchens of the humbler houses, next to garlands of onions and bundles of bay laurel leaves.  Outside every door in the village, a tidy pile of firewood has been stacked with an eye for size, type of wood, and overall  pattern  — for many of the homes here are still heated only by wood stoves.  All this meticulous preparation seems to say: We are ready to wait the winter out.

The village clock tower chimes the hours above a maze of deserted alleys and stairways. Nearly four o’clock. Time lies heavy on your hands indoors when it’s too cold to sit out on the balcony and chat with neighbors or to launder sheets in the communal fountain where the water gushes up bitter cold from a spring, turning your hands as red as a broiled lobster.   

Through the kitchen window I see my neighbor rolling out pasta dough on her marble-topped table. Her father and husband sit nearby,  playing an animated game of cards by the fireside. The manger scene  I can see set on her mantelpiece reminds me that  it’s time I prepared my little house in Tuscia for the holiday season. So I wrap up warmly, pull on a pair of boots, and basket in hand, I take to the woods, along a path bordered by the remnants of an old Etruscan wall.

           This village is surrounded by forests and farmland where  hundreds of Etruscan tombs and other pre-Roman ruins lie abandoned in an unchartered wood, the Selva del Malano. Here there are primitive cave dwellings carved in the cliffs, Etruscan altars to unknown gods, bizarre-shaped boulders inscribed with symbols. Here last autumn I went looking for porcini mushrooms. Today I have come hunting for pine cones and butcher’s broom with its bright red berries to decorate my hearth, and for rocks, twigs and moss to construct my presepe, the nativity scene — the traditional Christmas decoration in most Italian homes and public places, from hospitals to train stations. 

All you need to make  the backdrop for your presepe  is a  board covered with moss and twigs to set your  figurines on,  mountains made from crumpled paper, a sky of  dark blue wrapping paper studded with stars. Assembling these miniature scenes, inventing each year a new backdrop inspired by exotic or familiar landscapes, adding twinkling lights or ingenious trickling streams are part of the creative play delighting children and adults alike.

Our presepi reflect our yearly travels and place obsessions.

But it is the figurines that steal the show, whether they are hand-carved family heirlooms  or just plastic clones made in China  picked up cheaply at the market.  The presepe hearkens back to the Christmas pageants of medieval theater staged by craftsmen and shepherds. Here in the Cimini Hills, the tradition of the presepe is so strongly felt that for the twelve days of Christmas, entire villages transform themselves into living manger scenes and compete with each other to create the most opulent tableau vivant, drawing visitors from the neighboring towns, and sometimes even further. This year’s precept vivente in Tuscia may be found here.

            Cellars, courtyards, barns,  are requisitioned to make  the set. Village notables  and beauty queens vie for the leading roles and the whole village pitches in providing the needed skills: sewing costumes of brocade and burlap, collecting props, wiring for lights and music. Small children, pet ponies, donkeys, and sheep are enlisted as extras. Craftsmen and bakers set up their stalls where Christmas visitors  will see how bread is baked in a wood oven, how pots are created on a wheel, how cloth is woven on a rudimentary loom, how stone is carved.  They bear witness to the traditions of handicraft which still survive in these remote hills and offer a feast of rich colors, aromas, and music  enlivening  these old stone walls  and reviving the community’s sense of identity. Then after Epiphany,  all is dismantled and put away till next year. The grey tedium of winter will triumph till Carnival.

            The streets are still empty when I return from the woods with my basket of moss and rocks. Smoke curls up from the chimneys above the red-tiled roof tops.

  Tonight I’ll  sit by the fire and assemble my more modest presepe  and then  hang my home-made  wreath on the door.   But first I’ll indulge in the Tuscia’s preferred winter entertainment, especially when the temperature drops  below freezing like today: a plunge in the sulfur spring where the water bubbles up over one hundred degrees. There are half a dozen such springs scattered throughout the area, all within a ten minute drive.  

            My favorite is an open pool in a field right off the highway, surrounded by an olive grove and a crumbling  piece of Roman aqueduct. The locals come here to soak as a prelude or conclusion to  a meal, to  cure skin problems and arthritis, to relax and  socialize.  As I sit in  the steaming yellow water with the cold wind ruffling my hair, I contemplate Orion hanging low over the Cimini Hills in a sky of liquid cobalt.  Although the long winter has just begun in  the Tuscia, I’m not afraid of the cold, for I know  it will have its comforts and distractions,  its rituals of renewal.