Niki de Saint Phalle's 'Tarot Garden'

Thread originally posted on the Aeclectic Tarot Forum on 26 Oct 2002, and now archived in the Forum Library.

rota	26 Oct 2002
Niki de Saint Phalle was a French artist, who passed away just recently. She's known for many types and styles of painting and sculpture, but easily one of the most interesting efforts she made was her Tarot Garden. Here's a link to see it: http://www.nikidesaintphalle.com/entrance.html She designed freestanding sculptures and buildings that embodied, for her, the essential meanings of the various Major Arcana cards. They're curvy, colorful, covered inside and out with tile and mirror, odd, beautiful and fantastic. If you haven't seen these before, I'd be curious to read reactions.

kayne	26 Oct 2002
Woh! Truly bizarre! Never seen it before... Reminds me of Gaudy and Hundertwasser's work... I would really love to see them in real life. Do you know if she was commissioned to create this garden or if it was a personal project that she just wanted to do?

Diana	26 Oct 2002
edited

jmd	26 Oct 2002
& I had assumed the artist was Italian! sad to see her gone...

Pollux	26 Oct 2002
Don't forget that the original Tarot Garden is in Italy anyway... :P I gave another link on Aeclectic, in an old thread... Unfortunately I have lost my saved links. :( Anyway this link is so much better, the pics are so PURTY! *LOL* The Tarot Garden is not too far from Rome anyway. If some of you come over and are smart enough to tell me, I could drive you there. :)

Jeannette	26 Oct 2002
Quote: Originally posted by Diana ...I seem to recall that it was Rachel Pollack who did a reading for St Phalle (but perhaps it was someone else who did this reading - I can't remember the book in which I read this) because St Phalle was having some mental problems during this time - and the reading showed that St Phalle had to "let go" of her garden, like a mother has to "let go" of her children. Diana: I'm not sure where you might have found your information, but I do know that Rachel Pollack confirms that she did a reading for St Phalle in her book (now OOP), The New Tarot. Here is the relevant excerpt from that book: "...When I visited Niki de St Phalle she asked me to do a reading using the statues as cards. Since we could not shuffle the statues I asked the artist to draw a diagram of their placement on the property. We then read these as a layout. Next, her son-in-law, writer and photographer Laurent Fabius, took Polaroid photos of each of the statues. With these as cards, the artist shuffled them, and we laid them in the new order on top of the different places in the diagram. This not only gave us a new spread, it also allowed us to compare the two, seeing how one card had 'transmuted' into another. Finally, we went outside (we had been sitting inside the Empress) and walked from statue to statue, seeing the actual relationships they formed on the land itself. The system worked so well that Niki de St Phalle hopes eventually to publish and actual photograph of the entire garden, plus a set of photos to use as cards." I don't have any information that indicates that St Phalle ever published a photographic "reading mat" or a photographic reproduction of her garden in deck form, but in 2000, her drawings of the sculpture designs were printed as a set of 22 high-quality cards, which you can see here: http://www.tarotgarden.com/database/dbsearchengine.php?view_title=phalle It's very interesting -- we've had a marked increase in inquiries about St Phalle, her tarot garden, and her deck since she passed away. It seems as though she may become one of those artists whose work is appreciated more after her death than it was during her lifetime. -- Jeannette http://www.tarotgarden.com (P.S. -- for anyone who might be curious, no... the Tarot Garden name for our website was inspired by a different source, and not St Phalle's work. But I greatly admire her accomplishments nonetheless.)

rota	26 Oct 2002
Well, now I'm glad I brought her up, seeing the appreciation some members here have for her work. I thought everyone probably knew about her, but then found nothing about her in the Search. She holds a special spot in my heart these days. Not because she's passed on (from the widest perspective that's irrelevant), but because she's become one of my art heroes. This is the artist in me speaking now. She's one of the very few examples of an artist who began her career, really, as a favored darling of the art world of her time and became increasingly as she aged more and more the outsider. She began to produce stranger and more personal work than galleries seemed to want. The Tarot Garden is an example of that intensely personal work. [there are many examples of 'outsider' artists who gained favor with the mainstream movements of their day, becoming art market favorites, so-called insiders. jean jacques rousseau is the best known, but recently there's a whole crowd, a whole movement of outsider artists who have become a genre unto themselves and whose work is in chi-chi galleries everywhere now.] But the reason she's a hero to me is the daring beauty of her mid- and later career work: the Nana figures (fat ladies covered over with swirling colors), and the audacious 'clockwork' paintings whose elements move to and from on the surface, the mixed-media painted sculptures. So cheerful and so much fun. And not to mention the Tarot Garden. Similar in some ways to Antonio Gaudi's architecture, these are truly daring experiments in fabrication. Making a structure that's part building and part sculpture, covering it with tile and mirror and color inside and out, and endowing it with metaphysical purpose - to me, THAT is an astonishing achievement. I may not agree with the artistic choices, but the sheer drive, the purpose, and the ability to start the project and finish it symbolizes to me the godlike power of vision and recombination that lives inside artists. She's an inspiration to me.

The Niki de Saint Phalle's 'Tarot Garden' thread was originally posted on 26 Oct 2002 in the Talking Tarot board, and is now archived in the Forum Library. Read the active threads in Talking Tarot, or read more archived threads.