532 - Join Us in France Travel Podcast

[00:00:15] Annie: This is Join Us in France, episode 532. Cinq cent trente deux.

Bonjour, I’m Annie Sargent and Join Us in France is the podcast where we take a conversational journey through the beauty, culture, and flavors of France.

Today on the podcast

[00:00:31] Annie: Today, I bring you a conversation with Elyse Rivin of Toulouse Guided Walks about the fascinating life and work of Niki de Saint Phalle. Discover how this artist transformed personal trauma into colorful and whimsical public art that continues to captivate audiences worldwide.

From her early struggles to her innovative and controversial art practices, learn why Niki de Saint Phalle remains an enduring figure in the art world. And even if you hadn’t heard of her before today, if you visited Paris, you’ve probably seen some of her public art near the Pompidou Center in Paris. It’s a beautiful plaza and a favorite of children.

Podcast supporters

[00:01:12] Annie: This podcast is supported by donors and listeners who buy my tours and services, including my Itinerary Consult Service, my GPS self-guided tours of Paris on the VoiceMap app, or take a day trip with me around the southwest of France in my electric car. You can browse all of that at my boutique: joinusinfrance.com/boutique.

And Patreon supporters get new episodes as soon as they are ready and ad-free. If that sounds good to you, be like them, follow the link in the show notes.

Magazine segment

[00:01:43] Annie: For the magazine part of the podcast, after my chat with Elyse today, I’ll discuss plans to move some of the icons of the Paris Olympics to different neighborhoods in Paris.

And I’ll also answer a question that’s been asked many times on the podcast, where should I rent a car if I want to drive out of Paris without navigating the city center? It turns out the answer has changed recently.

Introduction and Topic Overview

[00:02:16] Annie: Bonjour, Elyse.

[00:02:17] Elyse: Bonjour, Annie.

[00:02:18] Annie: You have prepared a very interesting and weird topic for today.

[00:02:24] Elyse: Well, actually, I am very, very, very excited to do this today.We’re going to talk about an artist, a woman artist, who basically worked during the second half of the 20th century and who is now considered to be pretty much internationally known, and that is Niki de Saint Phalle.

[00:02:46] Annie: Right. So, I don’t know very much about her other than the fact that I’ve seen some of her installations in Paris by the Beaubourg Center. You have a permanent…

[00:02:59] Elyse: Fountain.

[00:02:59] Annie: Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve seen an expo of hers in Toulouse, a few years back.

[00:03:06] Elyse: I think it was two or three years ago.

[00:03:09] Annie: Right. It wasn’t that long ago. Yeah. And it was beautiful. I was really impressed. I think she does gorgeous things, but I don’t know very much about her. So I’m hoping you can enlighten me.

Early Life of Niki de Saint Phalle

[00:03:20] Elyse: Well, here we go. Let’s talk about this very, very, very interesting woman. She’s known as Nikki de Saint Phalle. In fact, her real name was Catherine Marie Agnès Phalle de Saint Phalle, and she was the daughter of a French count.

[00:03:39] Annie: Oh, wow.

[00:03:39] Elyse: And an American heiress.

[00:03:41] Annie: Okay. Oh, wow.

[00:03:43] Elyse: So she was born in 1930 in Neuilly, which is where a lot of rich people are born.

[00:03:49] Annie: Yeah.

[00:03:51] Elyse: And she didn’t come from the most wonderful family, it was a rather dysfunctional family, even though they were aristocrats.

And she was basically given over to her grandparents, and her family decided to move to the States where her mother was from, when she was about three and a half. So even though she was born in France, she actually grew up in the United States, and lived there until she was a young adult.

[00:04:16] Annie: Oh, okay. So she, she didn’t stay in France her whole childhood.

[00:04:20] Elyse: No, not at all. But she was brought up bilingual and was both a French citizen and an American citizen. And so after growing up partly in Connecticut, and then partly on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a very posh neighborhood, she decided to move back to France and basically hang out for a while in France and in Europe.

But before that, let me just say a couple of things about her growing up. It turns out that her, her mother was, sounds like an extremely unhappy and neurotic woman. Niki de Saint Phalle was one of four children, and her mother apparently was this extreme, severe disciplinary type of person.

And she was sent to these very strict, all girls Catholic schools that were very repressive. So she had a childhood that was not very happy.

[00:05:09] Annie: I bet. Yeah.

Struggles and Escape

[00:05:10] Elyse: And, it turns out, it didn’t come out until much, much later towards almost the end of her life when she was 64, which means in 1994, when she wrote her memoirs, she tells the fact that when she was 11, she was molested by her father.

[00:05:29] Annie: Oh, damn.

[00:05:30] Elyse: So, what happened with all of this was that, I don’t know if anybody knows exactly what her life was like in terms of being a student or anything else, but because she was extremely unhappy, she got out of her family life by eloping at the age of 18.

[00:05:48] Annie: Okay. So at that time she was living in…

[00:05:50] Elyse: She was living in the

States. She was living in New York. She eloped with someone who was, someone who had actually been a childhood friend who came from the same background, the same kind of upper class background. Someone named Harry Chapman, who happens to still be alive.

And I don’t know very much about him either, but clearly he was two years older than her. So she was 18 and he was 20. And the way she got out of this miserable family existence was literally they ran off and eloped.

And because they were both from the kind of background where they really had money and clearly they were not cut off, the money was not cut off from them, they went to Europe.

[00:06:30] Annie: Okay.

[00:06:30] Elyse: And her new husband was a budding poet, kind of writer, artist, poet. This is, we’re talking 30, this is, we’re talking 1948, so really just the years right after World War II. And for the first three or four years, two things happened that were very significant.

One was that they just bummed around Europe.

[00:06:53] Annie: Wow.

[00:06:53] Elyse: They just bummed around Europe. They went from one country to another, even though they had friends in France, and she of course still had friends and family in Paris. But the other thing that happened, very quickly, was that she had two children.

[00:07:06] Annie: Okay. Well, yeah, they’re… I mean, yeah, of course, yeah.

[00:07:09] Elyse: You know? So by the time she was 23, which is 1953, she had two children that she did not want.

[00:07:18] Annie: Oh, that’s bad.

[00:07:20] Elyse: That she basically gave to herother grandparents in France, to take care of for a while because the two of them were living this extremely strange bohemian life. This doesn’t make her a likable at first, I have to admit, this is just, you know, she was clearly someone who had lots of issues.

But what happened was that,with her husband, they met and became very involved in a group of artists and writers in Paris, who were very, very important and who in terms of the history of art in France for the second half of the 20th century, were among the most important and famous.

And they were a group of artists who called themselves ‘The New Realists’. Don’t ask me to explain that, that’s just the name they gave themselves. But they included some writers, and she found that this world that was not just the bohemian world, but the artistic world attracted her a lot.

[00:08:10] Annie: Okay.

[00:08:10] Elyse: And I think, if I understand correctly, having read a whole lot about her more than once, she realized that this is a way for her to channel some of her extreme emotions and feelings, that was probably, we could say, in a more positive way, you know.

Artistic Awakening

[00:08:26] Elyse: However, a very significant thing happened, right after she moved permanently to Paris.

And that was in the end of 1953, she was sent to a psychiatric hospital, private clinic. I won’t say a psychiatric hospital. She was sent to a private clinic because she had had severe depressions. And she was given electric shock.

[00:08:46] Annie: Okay.

[00:08:47] Elyse: If you imagine all of this, you would say, well, this doesn’t bode well for anybody in terms of what happens to the rest of their life.

But this is what happens, I’m quoting her, this is something she said, and since she was bilingual, she wrote a lot of stuff in English, so I don’t have to worry about my incorrect translation. She said: I started to paint while with the crazies. Right. And through this process turned madness into something good, I learned to translate into painting my feelings, fears, violence, hope, and joy.

[00:09:17] Annie: Wow. So this was like music. I mean, this is art therapy before we called it art therapy, I guess.

[00:09:24] Elyse: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so what happened was, when she came out of the clinic, and I don’t, it doesn’t sound like she was there for that long, I mean, it sounds like it was a few months or something like that. She decided that she wanted to be an artist. And it made me think a little bit of Frida Kahlo, who also became an artist because of suffering, of physical suffering, but also someone who’d had no background as an artist whatsoever and started painting while she was in hospital recuperating.

So it’s very similar in that kind of way. Now, the difference is that Niki de Saint Phalle not only had lived through this very strange life, rather perturbed, turbulent kind of existence, and was hanging out with this group of real artistic bohemians, but she was also gorgeous. And she was noticed by some famous photographers, and she started working as a model.

[00:10:17] Annie: And she wound up, actually, being on the cover of some of the most important magazines like Vogue and Elle. Wow. That’s yeah. That’s…

[00:10:26] Elyse: If you see pictures of her, you know, I mean, everybody has different tastes, but she was really quite, quite beautiful. And so strange is that she developed a first notoriety as a model, as being this very beautiful kind of eccentric woman.

And then when she decided to try and do some artwork, because she had the connections and I’m sure it did help, and because of her husband knowing all these people as well, she was allowed to participate in some artistic events with this group.

[00:10:57] Annie: Okay.

[00:10:57] Elyse: The reason I’m saying that is because we’re talking still about the 1950s when women were not allowed into many of these artistic groups.

[00:11:06] Annie: In France they weren’t.

[00:11:08] Elyse: No, I mean, this was still a hard thing to do, you know?

Rise to Fame: Les Tirs

[00:11:11] Elyse: And so what happened was that she made her name by doing something that of course sounds very strange, and it was, I’m sure, very, very strange, because this is the beginning of the time when artists were doing things like performances and installations, which of course has now become something sort of banal that young artists do pretty much all the time. Half the time you have no idea what they’re doing, but that, you know, that’s the thing.

But she decided to, I think her intention at the beginning, and I’m not sure, but I think her intention at the beginning was to shock. So what she did was she set up these performances where she had a rifle. I think it was like a BB, what do you call that?

[00:11:49] Annie: A BB gun?

[00:11:50] Elyse: BB Gun, you know, with pellets. And she had these canvases that were set up on the other side of this room.

So of course this was in front of a public. And she had these bags of paint that were attached to the canvas on the back. And she would shoot the canvas and then create a painting by having the paint burst out of these bags and splatter all over the canvases.

[00:12:15] Annie: How bizarre.

[00:12:16] Elyse: Yeah, these were called les tirs, which simply means shoot, right?

[00:12:21] Annie: Yeah, the shoots.

[00:12:22] Elyse: The shoots, yeah.

And so this is how she became famous.

[00:12:26] Annie: Well, she made some noise.

[00:12:29] Elyse: She made some noise, right? And what’s interesting is that, of course she didn’t hurt anybody, this is just, it was very, very unusual, huh? But it was thanks to the fact that she did these tirs, and they were televised. A couple of them were actually televised. Yeah, they were televised. This group of neorealists decided that they would admit her to the group.

[00:12:52] Annie: Now that she can get publicity, we want her.

[00:12:55] Elyse: Exactly. This was a way that they could get more publicity for the entire group. But from this point on, she really turns out to be a very, very interesting artist. Her life was turbulent and probably extremely complicated almost all the time, but she really became invested in being an artist.

Outsider Artists and “Women’s Art”

[00:13:16] Elyse: And so, over the years, and this really takes us into the 1970s, when she’s actually in her forties, she decided that what she wanted to do, because she had no background as an artist, she had no training as an artist, she discovered that what is called outsider art, which is basically art done by people who have no background, which has a certainderogatory quality. You know, a lot of people will say, Oh my God, no, these people are not trained as artists.

She sided with these people. She decided that this was what she thought was the most interesting kind of art, the art that came out of sort of an instinctive desire to create things, and it didn’t have to be this snobbery that comes from going to an art school and things like that, and she was very interested in portraying women.

[00:14:05] Annie: Okay.

[00:14:06] Elyse: And had no qualms about considering her art as a woman’s art, and what she said was very interesting.

She said, in most people’s mouths saying an art is a woman’s art is like making it inferior. She said, it’s not inferior, it’s just a woman’s point of view in making the art. That’s all it is. And just like a man makes art, that’s from a man’s point of view. And what she decided to do was start making sculptures.

Now at one point she really started doing these sculptures, I don’t know, but she went to see the Facteur Cheval, which we’ve both talked about.

Right, we… oh, I can’t remember what episode, I’ll put in the show notes. But we did a whole episode about Facteur Cheval, which was also a verydifferent, untrained, and very creative person.

And very eccentric. And she also in her traveling around Europe with her still first husband, discovered Gaudi.

[00:15:03] Annie: Ah, yeah.

Curvy Women Figures

[00:15:04] Elyse: And one of the things that she was inspired by with Gaudi was the combination of the curved forms. And the use of mosaic, and the use of color, and the use of glass, and all of these things.

And she was very attracted to this as a form of art, this kind of thing. But she decided that she wanted to put it to the service of creating things that were about the woman, and about women’s forms. You know, there have been a couple of male artists, painters, who have done lots of paintings of these very rounded women.

She decided to make them physicallyinto sculptures. And so this is, of course, is now what she is best known for is this, all these, these women, first small and then bigger, and then bigger and then bigger, till she got to the biggest one, which is over 15 meters long. And which I actually had the chance to see because in 2014 there was a huge retrospective of her work at the Grand Palais in Paris and they had reconstructed it for the exhibit, because there’s a huge, huge space in the center of the Grand Palais.

And I was, I know I was just telling you a couple of minutes ago, it’s this enormous woman, very round. The legs are very round, the body’s very round, the breasts are very round, everything’s very, it’s colorful as could be, it’s covered with all kinds of interesting little pieces of material and bright, bright, bright colors.

And the opening that allows you to go in and visit on the inside is the opening in between her legs.

[00:16:36] Annie: Aha. Okay. Interesting.

[00:16:38] Elyse: She said that what she wanted to do was take the female form and make it into something that is just a thing that is just playful. It doesn’t have any terrible significance to it in one way or the other.

[00:16:52] Annie: Demystify, I guess.

[00:16:54] Elyse: That’s the right word. That’s exactly right. To demystify it and at the same time play with the roundness of it.

This is one of the things that she does with all of her work. And so over the years she started creating these figures, and at the same time she was very interested in fairy tales, and in the idea of monsters. The kinds of monsters that you have as illustrations, for instance, in children’s books and things like that, where, you know, like the things that go squeak in the night, you know, and all those kinds of things.

And she said that one of the things she wanted to do, obviously, all of this going back to her childhood, was she wanted to create these… these oversized figures that because of being colorful and being so exaggerated, would be playful at the same time, and that children would be able to touch.

She wanted people to be able to touch her work and therefore get past their fears. So she’s, a lot of her work, all of her life had to do with fear and the idea of getting over fear. And then the idea of being joyful by the color and everything. So, she made many, many, many, many pieces. Some of her sculpture is small, it’s the kind of piece you can put on a pedestal inside a room somewhere.

Public Art and Legacy

[00:18:11] Elyse: But a lot of her work is very big, and as her work progressed over the years, and she became really more and more famous, she decided that what she wanted more than anything else was to create work in public spaces where it was accessible to everybody. This became her, basically her second obsession, that she didn’t want work in museums where you had to pay to go in.

She wanted her work to be in parks, in public outdoor spaces, where people could walk over, they could climb on them, they could touch them. And of course, one of the things that happened by doing work like this was that a lot of people started saying, well, you know, we’re sure this is fun, but this is not art, you know, I mean, this is the whole controversy about what is art.

And she was very adamant that all of this is indeed art, it’s just that this is art that is available to anybody and doesn’t have to be for the elite, and I think that this was just one of those things that she dealt with her entire life.

[00:19:12] Annie: Right, she was probably just focused on sharing the stuff. Going back to the children bit. I have, when I went in Toulouse, it was actually funny because my husband was having cataract surgery at a clinic right by Les Abattoirs, where they… No, no, it was Les Abattoirs, where they had the show.

And so I walked over there and when I walked over there, I didn’t have a reservation, but there was a long line, including a big group of children that some a couple of ladies who probably run a daycare center brought the kids. And some of the people look like, oh what are these young children going to do here?

Because they were all under five, you know, well under five. And they loved it. They love it, but they couldn’t touch.

You couldn’t.

No, you couldn’t touch at that exhibit. But a lot of the stuff, her installations that are out in public, you can touch and kids love it. It’s beautiful.

[00:20:08] Elyse: That’s interesting too, to point that out, because of course, inside a museum, it’s a no no, right? And that was one of the things she wanted to get away from. So she explicitly chose public spaces to do her larger pieces and wanted them to be pieces that could be touched, climbed on, even go inside of, some of them are actually very, very strange, these sort of huge, strange, monster looking kinds of things, or big women.Some of the pieces, this is fascinating. So as part of the show notes, I wrote down, I had gone online and made a list of a lot of the most important or well known pieces, she did in the early 1960s, she was invited by somebody, I have no idea who, to do a public piece in Hanover, Germany. And so what she did was she did an outdoors piece of three of these women, very… you know, they’re big, they’re round, they’re very colorful, they all kind of look like they’re almost dancing, you know.

[00:21:09] Annie: And they’re shiny.

The color is very shiny and very bright. I don’t know how she made them. The process of making them must have been interesting. Sorry, I interrupted.

[00:21:18] Elyse: No, no, no, but I’ll talk, it’s a good thing you mentioned that because we’ll talk about that in a second.

The Iconic Sculptures of Hanover: Les Nanas

[00:21:21] Elyse: But what happened was, I don’t know who gave her permission to do this, but she set these up, she finished them. But of course, by this time she was, you know, she had her own big studios where she could do her work.

They were all set up, there are lots of pictures of them, you can find them almost anywhere. And she called them Les Trois Nanas, which of course is the word in French for, it’s an informal word for women, basically.

[00:21:44] Annie: Nana is, normally it’s a good looking woman.

[00:21:46] Elyse: It’s a good looking woman. These three very voluptuous, you know, very kind of.. And, so this is the beginning of the 1960s, so… you know… a group of people in Hanover started a petition to get rid of them.

They said that this was, you know, not art, that it was scandalous. And what happened was that it created this kind of debate in Hanover, Germany. And in the end, there were more people who voted to keep the sculptures than there were that wanted to get rid of the sculptures.

[00:22:16] Annie: Oh, good.

[00:22:17] Elyse: And now the irony is that in the museum in Hanover, has one of the largest collection of her work of any place in the world.

[00:22:24] Annie: Very good.

[00:22:26] Elyse: It became the symbol of Hanover, the three nanas, you know.

Niki de Saint Phalle’s Public Art

[00:22:31] Elyse: And this was the beginning of her doing these very, very big, very, very flamboyant outdoor pieces, which of course she has done in a lot of different places. Sometimes invited by a town, or sometimes she just asked for permission.

She would go and find a place that was outside in public. She did two pieces in Jerusalem of all places. One of them called The Golem. And the Golem is a word that it means the monster.

[00:22:58] Annie: Okay.

[00:22:59] Elyse: She was invited to do a piece, this is also in the middle of the 1960s, after she started to really become famous. And apparently, at first they wanted her to do it on the grounds of this very big museum.

And she said, no. No, no, no, no, no, it has to be out in a public space where everybody can go over, can sit on it, can climb it, can touch it.

[00:23:19] Annie: That’s really, I mean, a sign that she was really confident about the quality of the material and that it would stand up to time.

[00:23:29] Elyse: Yes.

The Toxicity of Art Materials

[00:23:30] Elyse: So the problem is, and you really said the magic word, asking about what she did this with. She worked with polymers. Was talking about an artist who’s become pretty much famous, internationally famous, starting in the 1960s. Nobody knew too much about the toxic effect of a lot of these things that she was working with.

So she was working with sprays. She was working with polymers. And she was working with all kinds of materials that turned out to be extremely toxic. And so what happened to Niki de Saint Phalle is that by the time she was in her late thirties, and she never smoked, ever. By the time she was in her late thirties, she started to have respiratory problems from the work that she was doing and the materials that she was working with.

And even though I suppose that at some point she started wearing masks, she never stopped using these materials. And in the end she died in the year 2001 at the age of 71.

But in the last 10 years of her life she suffered enormously from all kinds of horrible respiratory things and lung problems because of the materials that she had used.

The toxicity of the things she used was terrible, terrible, terrible. And yet she continued. She just refused to stop.

[00:24:55] Annie: Right, so she knew it wasn’t good for her.

[00:24:57] Elyse: By this time. By the time she was almost 40, she was already having problems. She had huge emphysema. She had all kinds of things. In the end she died of respiratory failure. And she suffered enormously the last few years of her life.

But I’m sure by that time she had changed some of the materials, but it was basically too late. It was just impossible for her to recuperate what she had lost in terms of her lungs and the capacity to do that.

(Mid-roll ad spot)

Marriage and Artistic Collaboration

[00:25:26] Elyse: In the 1970s, she married her second husband,a sculptor, an artist named Jean Tinguely, who was actually Swiss, and who was famous for doing what are called kinetic sculptures.

And the one that’s the fountain that is next to Pompidou Center is a joint venture of the two of them because it’s got her colorful sculptures and his pieces that turn and spray with the water and everything.

[00:25:52] Annie: Very nice.

[00:25:53] Elyse: And they did a lot of work together. They collaborated a lot on pieces. In the end, I don’t think they, as a couple, they were together for about 10 years and then they were no longer actually a couple, but he became and stayed her partner of choice for many projects through the rest of her life.

Anyway, they just stayed very, very close.

[00:26:15] Annie: Did she ever become rich?

[00:26:18] Elyse: She was rich.

[00:26:19] Annie: Well, okay, but…

And yes, and she became rich in terms of her artwork. And the way she did, and it was very clever of her, actually, was that in order to have the money to do these monumental pieces, she made a lot of small pieces that sold.

There are, you know, hundreds and hundreds of museums, ironically, that have some of these smaller, very colorful sculptures, but also, at the same time she was doing all of this, she did a lot of work on paper.

[00:26:49] Elyse: And she did these very beautiful drawings and we were just looking at some of the pictures because we did both see the same retrospective here in Toulouse.

Political and Social Activism in Art

[00:26:58] Elyse: Starting in the 1970s she became very politically active in terms of using political, social issues in her work, partly because she had several friends who were dying of AIDS.

And partly because of various events that were going on in the world.

So she spent time in the United States. She would go back and forth. She lived for years and years in Paris, but she really would go back and forth from one country to the next. And she became very involved in dealing with issues of racism, dealing with problems with AIDS and the phobia of homosexuality.

And she took on all of these subjects in her drawings, not in the big sculptural pieces, which were basically neutral in that sense. You know, they’re colorful, they’re big and all of that, but she was very explicit in the paperwork. And some of it is just very beautiful of these gorgeous little drawings, very colorful.

Everything’s always filled with color in her work. But with text that is very explicit against racism, againstall kinds of prejudices, against war,against guns, ironically, of course, after the initial thing. Yeah, the tir right, you know. These pieces are in collections everywhere.

And these, of course, sold for a huge amount of money because they’re originals, it’s not printed out, you know, in multiple copies. And they’re gorgeous.

[00:28:23] Annie: And they have things to say.

And she drew on them. She colored them. I guess if she hadn’t been so famous, nobody maybe would have paid attention to these pieces, but she was very famous and had proved that she could do art.

[00:28:39] Elyse: Absolutely, she really could. And her color is, it’s because some of these pieces, especially the pieces that are on paper, if you don’t get up close to read the text, it’s just joyful. It’s just beautiful color and little figurines and things like that all over the place and it’s lovely to look at.

[00:28:57] Annie: I’ll share photos of a lot of these things on social media, on Facebook and on Instagram,I’m also on BlueSky and let’s see, on Threads. Huh? I never talk about those, but I am.

[00:29:10] Elyse: Good for you.

[00:29:10] Annie: You can see the photos on those.

[00:29:12] Elyse: Basically what happened was as she got older, she became more ambitious in the size of her projects. And so she took on these enormous mammoth, mammoth projects that of course she had to finance. Because a lot of them she financed herself. She wasn’t given grant money, she wasn’t given money by cities or anything like that.

[00:29:32] Annie: I figured she had lots of cash anyway from being rich, I mean, family money.

[00:29:37] Elyse: Yeah, except that it’s not usual for an artist to self finance everything.

It really is not. Yeah, really.

The Tarot Garden: A Monumental Project

[00:29:44] Elyse: And of course, the biggest piece that she ever did, which was finished sadly posthumously because she, when she died in 2001, it was almost finished, but not quite, is this piece that we were just talking about called the Tarot Garden.

[00:29:59] Annie: Ah, yes. I had never heard of this and you told me all about it. Fantastic. I want to go see it now.

[00:30:04] Elyse: I can’t wait to go. I just actually can’t, it’s a good excuse to go to Italy anyway. It’s a huge, several hectares of land. And she created sculptural figures that are exaggerated, kind of monster like, but incredibly colorful, with mosaic, and pieces of glass, and pieces of paint. And they’re unbelievable to look at.

And every one of them is one of the 22 tarot cards.

[00:30:32] Annie: Right. So tarot cards are probably not something everybody’s heard of. They are kind of a, okay, so in France, you can play tarot, and it’s just a game. It’s a bit of a complicated card game that requires special cards because you play in suits. But it’s also something that’s used for divination. And I’ve played tarot a lot, in my youth.

I don’t even remember the rules anymore because it’s been so long, but it’s a very common kind of deck of cards that you take to school, and at during lunch break, you would play tarot or belotte, whichever one.

belotte is played with a regular deck of cards, but Tarot, you need a special deck of cards.

[00:31:15] Elyse: I think in the States, tarot is known for the divination, for fortune telling.

[00:31:20] Annie: Yeah, I’ve never met an American who played the game tarot.

[00:31:23] Elyse:

[00:31:23] Annie: But in France you do.

[00:31:24] Elyse: But I remember when I was much younger, I had somebody read my cards, you know, and that was like…

[00:31:29] Annie: Ha ha ha. I see death!

[00:31:32] Elyse: Exactly. You don’t want to have certain cards come up, you know? I was like… It’s very fascinating, you know.

In 1994, she wrote her memoir, and that is when she talks for the very first time publicly about what happened to her when she was a child at home.

She talks about the treatment of her by her mother, she talks about the abuse by her father. And it’s very interesting because the two children she had were brought up by her ex husband. She obviously saw them as adults later on in her life. And you think that she was 20, 21 when she had these children, but she basically lived her life away from the children.

[00:32:11] Annie: Might have been a good thing, actually, if she was a bit crazy, and from that kind of background… Yeah, maybe that was a better thing for the kids.

[00:32:19] Elyse: Probably, I mean, I went online, she now has their adult grandchildren, so they survived all of this without too much trouble.

Legacy and Global Impact

[00:32:26] Elyse: My guess is, I would assume, I have really no idea, that as she got older, she was able to be with them, but they were already adults, you know, I mean, by that time, so it was a whole other story. She really, by the time we get into the 1980s, she is really world famous and she has public work all over Europe.

She has public work in the United States, many pieces, many, many pieces in California, she also has a lot of public work of all places in Japan.

[00:32:57] Annie: Wow.

[00:32:58] Elyse: Which is very interesting. Very interesting to see where some of her work has gone. And so, in the 1990s, when she was in entering, basically the end of her 60 something, I mean, because she died when she was just 71, but she was really sick.

The lung problems, the respiratory problems really meant that she was in and out of hospital a lot, but she kept on working. And I was reading something yesterday where it said that in the last six months of her life, she spent almost all the time in the hospital, but she was already preparing new projects. She didn’t stop.

She never stopped. She wanted to create and she wanted, this was what she wanted to leave to the world was these major outdoor public pieces. And a couple of them were of course, like the last one that she did in the States, which was in Escondido, which is where she had lived, we’re finished in the year after her death.

In France, she had the huge retrospective in 2014, which I had the chance of actually going to see. I did know about her work already. I don’t remember why or where, I have no idea, but I knew about her work before I went to see the show. But when you go to see the show, like the one that we had here, the one in Paris, it had pretty much the same things as here, but some of the huge pieces that they couldn’t carry and bring to a place like Toulouse, the huge monumental pieces. But she has big pieces just about everywhere.

Museums that display her work

[00:34:28] Elyse: And there were three museums that have a lot of her work.

One of them is in Nice.

[00:34:33] Annie: Oh, which one?

[00:34:35] Elyse: A Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.

[00:34:37] Annie: Oh, and I’ve been to that. I don’t remember it, but Okay. Okay.

[00:34:41] Elyse: She donated 170 works to the museum the year she died, as part of her legacy. I assume that a lot of the pieces are on paper and smaller pieces, but they’re there.

[00:34:52] Annie: That might be why I don’t remember them.

[00:34:54] Elyse: I think she has just two or three big outdoor pieces, maybe in the gardens surrounding the museum.

[00:35:00] Annie: Yeah, because when you see her big pieces, they’re hard to miss.

[00:35:03] Elyse: Absolutely, they’re hard to miss, yeah. She created a museum using her own money in the Freiburg, Switzerland, which is where her Jean Tinguely, her second husband was from. And he died very suddenly in 1991, and they were at the process of working on a project together that they had, you know, they’d been working together for almost 30 years.

And so she decided that she was going to make sure that there was a museum that would have his work, and it is now called the Niki de Saint Phalle – Jean Tinguely Museum in Freiburg, Switzerland. And it has many pieces by both of them.

And then the largest collection of her work is in the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany, the city that at first did not want her work, yeah, and is now very, very proud of the fact that they own the biggest collection of her work.

[00:35:56] Annie: And you list a few more Sun God in San Diego.

[00:36:00] Elyse: Yes.

[00:36:01] Annie: The Moon in Bria Mall in California.

[00:36:04] Elyse: The Great Amorous Bird in Switzerland, in Nendrisco, I have no idea where that is in Switzerland. She did a lot of birds, interestingly enough.

[00:36:12] Annie: And some of her smaller sculptures have birds and snakes. And the birds and snakes are always very colorful and very, they’re not frightening to me. And the women, and the very large women, you know, I’m like, Hey, I like these ladies, they look like they’re dancing. They have their arms up and they look like they’re dancing, celebrating, having a good time.

They’re not frightening in any way.

[00:36:38] Elyse: No, and I think especially with the women, because she has women that are upright dancing, she has women that are lying down, she has women in all kinds of very strange positions, but they seem to be celebrating what a woman is. There’s just something about them, the roundness of them, the movement of them, that they’re very colorful, they’re very joyful and all of that.

There’s a big, apparently there’s a hugecollection of her pieces in a museum in Stockholm as well. And Stockholm was one of the first cities to ask her to come and do some pieces for them, even before Hanover did. So it’s very interesting to see where she was invited to go and then where she basically said, Oh, can I come here?

You know, can I get like the Tarot Garden? She chose the place.

[00:37:23] Annie: She must have been a really interesting person to talk to. So what, how did she do this? She picked up the phone and called the city and said I want to talk to the mayor and I want to put a statue, you know, a massive statue here or something? I don’t know.

[00:37:37] Elyse: I mean, certanly by the 1980s she was famous enough that I think she could do something like that. But then, of course, they would have to offer her a public space. But if I remember correctly, and I may not remember this exactly correctly, she knew some, there’s an Italian architect named Mario Boto, who was a very good friend of hers.

They worked together on some things. He’s very famous as a contemporary architect.

And apparently,he told her about this piece of land. I don’t know if it was a piece of land that he knew about that, or he had, he was from this area, but he’s the one that gave her the idea of going to this particular place and doing this huge Tarot Garden.

And so he helped, I think he helped negotiate to get the land for her.

You know, so that she could do it. And it’s very interesting because it says that she explicitly said it has to be free. So when she died, not all 22 pieces were finished, almost all of them, but not the last couple were finished, but they were finished by, you know, with her instructions afterwards.

And it’s run by the Niki de Saint Phalle Foundation, which means it drains money because you don’t pay to go and visit this. She wanted to make sure it was free, but it is only open half a year because they have to do a lot of upkeep on the pieces because they’re made of millions of pieces of glass and mosaic and ceramic.

Andwhen you look at these pieces, you can’t even imagine the work that went into doing them.

[00:39:08] Annie: Well, and outside, I mean, they get a beating, you know?

Yeah. I mean, just imagine, like looking around my house, I built a wooden fence a few years back and it looks like it needs to be redone. Because it’s just sitting outside all day. So anything you do outside is going to need some maintenance.

Yeah.

[00:39:30] Elyse: Absolutely. And these pieces, especially the Tarot Garden, I’m not sure some of the others too, I think towards the end, these are concrete on an armature, on a metallic frame, covered with mosaics, so the weight of them, can you imagine what that is, you know, between the glass, the ceramic, the cement, everything else, these are huge pieces that take a lot of technical know how to get done.

[00:39:53] Annie: Right, so you have to have the know how of a contractor, of a builder, of a sculptor, but then the artsy bit,which is very, very important.

I wonder if people think that her art wasa bit,it’s so friendly and joyful, and because she was a, I mean, she had her demons, I’m sure she was a dark person.

She had some dark times in her youth, especially. So is it too light? Is it too, you know, like…

[00:40:23] Elyse: That’s the, it’s so, that is actually interesting because that’s, I added that just as a little bit of a thing at the very end. I actually know people in the art world, I won’t mention who, because it doesn’t matter to anybody out there anyway, who dismiss her work, on the grounds that she’s it’s too user friendly, it’s too approachable, it’s too colorful, it’s too simple.

I, with all of my background and my training, I can’t stand that attitude, I really can’t, because I think that just because work is accessible, just because work is colorful, just because work does not have to be, is not obscure and dark. I mean, there are things that can be obscure and dark can be interesting for other reasons, but I, I think that it’s a total snobbery to say that this is not worth looking at because it is not like that.

[00:41:15] Annie: Well, the guys who were hanging bicycles and toilets up on walls were about the same time frame, right?

[00:41:21] Elyse: No, they were earlier.

They were a lot earlier. The 20th century was a century basically of enormous upheaval and provocation, and doing things to basically… At first, it was just to shock. She even said, you know, she said at first when she started doing all this stuff, even the shooting with the gun, it was to shock.

It was to provoke. It was to see how people would react.

But she didn’t hurt anybody, or do anything like that. It was just that like, oh, this is really, you know, some people will say it’s stupid, some people would say it’s silly. But then she started really refining her ideas of why she wanted to do art.

And that is when it really gets to be interesting. And honestly, having seen the retrospective in the Grand Palais and then the one we saw just a couple of years ago here in Toulouse, when you see the variety of form, the variety of style in terms of whether it’s paper, whether it’s small pieces, whether it’s bigger pieces, whether some of it is very serious and talks about very serious issues. One of the things that you take away from all of this is that she was able to do this and still maintain the exuberance of the color and everything else. I just think it’s wonderful.

[00:42:31] Annie: I think it’s beautiful stuff. You know, I’m a simple person, and I love that children look at this and it makes them smile. It makes them happy to see it. Even very young children, like you can’t explain to very young children the concept behind a piece, they just have to like it or not, you know?

[00:42:51] Elyse: Exactly.

[00:42:51] Annie: And there’s a lot to like in what she made. And I think she made the world a better place, even though she had a pretty rough start. So, yay for Niki de Saint Phalle.

[00:43:02] Elyse: Yeah. Yay for Niki de Saint Phalle. Yes, indeed.

[00:43:06] Annie: And we need more like that.

Because, I think if you take a walk in a park, or in a city, and there’s a plaza or something with some beautiful piece, beautiful colorful piece, it makes life better.

It just does. I don’t know why it does, but it does.

[00:43:21] Elyse: It does, you know? If you look at some of the pictures, some of the pieces that are out there, she did these monsters where the tongue turns into a slide that the kids can crawl up on, the ears are sticking out. I mean, if you take a look at it carefully, it’s really monsters, you know, I mean, they really are.

Yet, the combination of the colors, the materials that are used, and the fact that you can go on it and touch it, she said, by making them touchable, and you can crawl on it, it makes the fear of whatever it is that you have fear of, you know, go away. I mean, that’s basically the bottom line.

Conclusion: Celebrating Niki de Saint Phalle

[00:43:54] Elyse: So you’re right.

I think that a lot of this work that is really so colorful and interesting came out of some very dark places, but boy, she produced enormous amounts of work in the, basically the 50 years that she was able to be an artist.

[00:44:11] Annie: She conquered.

[00:44:12] Elyse: She conquered.

[00:44:13] Annie: Thank you so much, Elyse. That was very interesting.

[00:44:16] Elyse: Thank you, Annie. It was fun.

[00:44:17] Annie: Merci beaucoup. Au revoir.

Thank you Patrons

[00:44:26] Annie: Again, I want to thank my patrons for giving back and supporting the show. Patreon supporters get new episodes as soon as they are ready and ad-free. If that sounds good to you, be like them, follow the link in the show notes.

And of course, patrons get many more exclusive rewards for supporting this show, you can see them at patreon.com/joinu s. And I have just one new Join Us in France Champion to thank this week, Catherine who didn’t share her last name, but joined at the yearly Groupie du Podcast patron. Thank you, Catherine.

And to all my current patrons, it is wonderful to have you on board in the community of travel enthusiasts and francophiles who keep this podcast going.

And it’s going to be even more important going forward because France is in a bit of a pickle when it comes to a budget and the debt, and they are putting in new rules to try and collect more taxes. And unfortunately, people like me who run very small businesses are getting hit pretty hard. I hope they change the rules quickly because it just passed yesterday. So this is all brand new. We will see if we have enough of a lobby to get this change, but right now they’re going to really hit us hard, so your support is much, much appreciated.

And to support Elyse go to patreon.com/Elysart.

Favorite Restaurants around Notre Dame Paris

[00:45:54] Annie: This week I published a list of my favorite restaurants around Notre Dame de Paris, with photos and an explanation of why. And it’s not so much what I share, but the fact that I’m available to patrons who want to chit chat with me or who want to ask me questions.

Updated VoiceMap tour

[00:46:09] Annie: My updated Île de la Cité tour is now live. It was pretty good before, and now it’s even better, because who doesn’t want to be guided through the stories told by the doorways of Notre Dame? People pass through there without, you know, they look and they think, Oh, it’s pretty, but they have no idea what… what the stories are.

I can tell you what the stories are. I hope you enjoy it. And if you bought it in the past, you can delete the old version of that VoiceMap tour and get the new one. It’s free for people who’ve already bought it.

And of course, podcast listeners get a big discount for buying these tours from my website: join usinfrance.com/boutique to do that, anything you want to buy from me, it’s at the boutique.

If you’re thinking about a trip to France and have a hard time deciding what to do, I can help you making some important decisions, I do one on one consultations on Zoom. There are two levels of support, and you can also see about that at joinusinfrance.com/boutique.

Symbols of Paris

[00:47:08] Annie: Okay, let’s talk about the iconic symbols of Paris. If you remember the Olympics, it wasn’t that long ago, the Paris 2024 Olympics, they had iconic symbols that they were displaying. And those, some of those might find a new home in La Chapelle District of the 18th Arrondissement. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has suggested relocating the statues of the 10 notable French women.

They were prominently featured in the opening ceremony to Rue de la Chapelle. The idea is to create a lasting tribute to a historically working class and immigrant neighborhood, an area that has seen a lot of transformation in recent years. This is definitely not a touristy part of Paris, but they want to gentrify it, is really what’s happening.

And so far it’s worked. The Olympics have done a lot of good in that part of the North of Paris. And so hopefully it will continue.

The statues themselves represent key figures in French history. Women who have made an impact in science, politics, literature, and social progress. So placing them in a public space where people walk by all the time could be a great way to keep their stories alive beyond the games.

Now, what about the Olympic rings and the Olympic cauldron? That’s a bit less certain. The rings were displayed on the Eiffel tower. They’ve been a big conversation piece. What’s going to happen with them we don’t know. We don’t know very much. We don’t even know if they’ll be in Paris permanently or not.

As for the cauldron, it was lit in the Tuileries Gardens, instead of a traditional stadium setting. There’s still debate over where it should end up. Some people think it should remain in a public space, as a reminder of the games, but no firm plans have been announced.

So while the statues are almost certainly heading to La Chapelle, the fate of the other major Olympic symbols is still up in the air.

Where to Rent a car in Paris

[00:49:11] Annie: Okay, for those of you who would like to rent a car in Paris so you can go explore the Loire Valley or anywhere outside of Paris, here’s what you need to know. You’ve heard me say that driving in Paris is a terrible idea and very stressful, even if you’re used to driving in large cities, because in Paris, they have different rules than in the rest of France, or the rest of the world. They are unique. Their own thing. So if you’re used to driving, like in France, Canada, the US, Germany, by that, I mean, the left hand side steering wheel, then you yield to traffic coming from your left in a roundabout. In Paris, you yield to traffic coming from the right. And that makes the mess you can witness around the Arc de Triomphe. But that’s hardly the only mess in Paris. I was near the Les Invalides, there’s a roundabout in front of the Invalides, same thing, right hand side priority. People don’t understand how these works.

French people who didn’t learn how to drive in Paris anymore, don’t know how to do those either. So it’s a mess. I learned how to drive in Toulouse, and I taught driving in Toulouse as well, years and years ago, back when we still had a few of those right hand side priorities, in all of France, we still had some in Toulouse.

They’ve all been converted to regular roundabouts with yielding to the left. In Paris, they’re not making that change, yet, perhaps never, and so it’s very different. So if you have a young driver who learned how to drive in Toulouse, driving to Paris, they don’t get it either. So it’s… it’s a big mess.

Most places in the world, when you enter a freeway or a belt route, you yield to traffic that’s already on the freeway, right? In Paris, the people entering the freeway have priority, which is why they act like jerks. So don’t drive in Paris and in the inner belt of Paris, if you look at a, if you zoom out on a map of Paris on Google, you can see Paris has two belt routes, really,

the inner one, you don’t want to be there. You just don’t want to be there. I used to say, rent your car either at CDG, that’s the airport, Charles de Gaulle airport, or one of the portes, west of Paris. Porte Maillot was often recommended.

Well, there’s an even simpler solution now. Take Metro line 14 to the airport.

Now you’ll need to pay the 13 Euro special airport Metro ticket to do that. And then set your GPS to Normandy, the Loire Valley, or Strasbourg, or Toulouse, or even if you’re going North of Paris, say you’re going to Lille, which is due North, your GPS should not take you through Paris central at all. Orly airport is South of Paris and it’s surrounded by freeways that can take you in any direction, and GPSs are usually smart enough to keep you away from city centers.

So if I’m ever in a situation where I need to rent a car in Paris, that’s what I’ll do, rent from Orly airport.You can get to it fast and safe.You know, I have a problem with the RER to Charles de Gaulle Airport, because they haven’t put in real security that stops thieves from grabbing bags out of the hands of unsuspecting visitors who’ve just arrived.

And I don’t feel comfortable recommending that you take that.

Now, if you listen to the podcast, you’ve heard about this. What happens is the RER between CDG and Paris, there are some that don’t make any stops. There are some that do make stops. If it makes a stop somewhere the doors will open, some thief, or usually it’s two of them, thieves will rush in, grab bags, rush out.

The door’s closed. The RER moves on and you’ve lost your luggage. Okay? This happens every day, dozens of times, and there’s not enough security to stop it. So, that’s why I recommend that if you’re going to take the RER between CDG and Paris, you only take the direct RER because then that problem is not likely to happen.

I have to say also that the Metro is a bit more reliable than the RER generally speaking, it’s a brand new Metro, a very old RER, you know, yeah, it’s more reliable. So personally I’d go to Orly airport to pick up my rental car.

My thanks to podcast editors, Anne and Christian Cotovan, who produced the transcripts.

Next week on the podcast

[00:53:45] Annie: Next week on the podcast, an episode with Hannah Compton called Baby Moon in Paris, and yes, it’s about having a trip to Paris while pregnant, very pregnant, and have a great time all the same.

And remember, patrons get an ad-free version of this episode, click on the link in the show notes to be like them.

Thank you so much for listening. And I hope you join me next time so we can look around France together. Au revoir.

Copyright

[00:54:12] Annie: The Join Us in France travel podcast is written, hosted, and produced by Annie Sargent, and Copyright 2025 by AddictedToFrance. It is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, no derivatives license.

Subscribe to the Podcast

Apple Google Spotify RSS

Support the Show

Tip Your Guides Extras Patreon Audio Tours

Transcript for Episode 532: Discovering Niki de Saint Phalle: From Personal Struggles to International Fame