Early works and Assemblages

Personal crisis in the early 1950s led Niki de Saint Phalle to begin painting. Her works of this period were naïve in style and depict figures, imaginary landscapes, buildings and mythical creatures using a broad range of colours, covering surfaces with dense and decorative patterns. The paintings are highly distinctive with subjects mediated through the artist’s personal experiences and vivid imagination. They include themes that continued to appear throughout her career – mythology, the domestic environment, man, woman and femininity.

As Saint Phalle’s work developed she began to create an immensely personal world using found everyday materials, such as plastic toys and household objects, embedded in plaster reliefs. The works became increasingly abstract, reducing the decorative patterns of her early paintings to pared down landscapes.
In 1959-60 Saint Phalle introduced a number of violent objects into her work – knives, nails, blades and guns. These works were explorations and manifestations of her personal aggression and are a revolt against the constraints of her social environment, her bourgeois upbringing and feelings of entrapment. Many of these assemblages, such as Le Hachoir 1960and La Paysage de la mort (Collage de la Mort) 1960, were termed ‘Death Landscapes’. They are evocative of the desolation and darkness she was experiencing at the time.

Influenced by Jean Tinguely, with whom she now lived, works such as Queen of Hearts 1960-61 were given a dynamism and expanded sculptural presence through the use of wire attached directly to the picture surface. Recognition for such invented assemblages was finally achieved through her participation in the Art of Assemblage exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1961.