Ask most people about Niki de Saint Phalle, and they’ll mention colourful, oversized, dancing women statues, with one leg raised, two arms out, and head back, in a permanent moment of movement. It is true, she did a legion of these wonderful, positive-feeling statues. The exhibition on Niki de Saint Phalle, her long-term partner Jean Tinguely, and Pontus Hultén at the Grand Palais in Paris shares a much more complex and layered story. I wish to focus on the huge black and white landscape – King Kong (1963) – that struck me at first sight to be of the same nature as Picasso’s Guernica – a fundamentally powerful piece of political criticism, lamenting the destruction and social violence of those times. In these times, half a century later, it is still fresh and worth a close look.
King Kong is one of her shooting paintings, with plastic objects embedded in panels covered in plaster and then shot at with black paint. At the top centre, there is a sun, bleached, frowning, with black blood flowing from its eyes down onto the world – onto the monster, a Tyrannosaurus Rex (I first thought of Godzilla; there was a film of King Kong fighting Godzilla that came out in 1962). The monster is attacking the skyscrapers, and planes fly in from the right to, presumably, destroy the beast. But they could also be bombing the buildings, and communicating Niki de Saint Phalle’s criticism of the destructive nature of those Cold War times and their proxy wars.
The monster is not a flesh and blood monster, it is an aggregate of plastic lizard toys, bent chicken wire, scraps, cloth, plastic shrimps or crayfish, a death mask, and many things difficult to discern – a living detritus of our society that has become a monster to attack humanity. Perhaps an early environmental sculpture criticising consumerism and a plastic society. Niki de Saint Phalle was a visionary and revolutionary thinker.
The wall of faces comprises ten harrowing masks that communicate the Cold War. These were “found objects” that she used, perhaps US President John F. Kennedy, USSR’s Premier Nikita Khrushchev, France’s General de Gaulle, and Cuba’s Prime Minister Fidel Castro, but I could be mistaken. They are spattered by the black blood of the times, the white and black palette presumably representing the duality of life and death, though in this artwork, white does not appear as life, but rather as what’s left after life is bleached out – a hollow mask in plastic, plaster and paint, like bones bleached in the desert sun, only an echo.
Death is represented by the couple to the left of the set of masks, with the bottom left mask being the skull of a bodiless man, next to presumably his wife holding the wedding bouquet, all soot, charred, black to her chest. They are not flowers of joy. Her eyes are empty hollows; perhaps the prince she married died in the wars.
There is, however, also life – a child on a bicycle, children playing ball above a white heart with a black hole in it, all under a woman, with black hollow eyes, giving birth in harrowing detail. She is broken, hollow, made of an amalgam of recuperated toys – a horse, carriage, soldiers – toys no longer able to bring any joy, also defaced by the dark mark of black blood or oil. This life is dead, or at least under the threat of death and destruction of those times, still speaking to us today. Here, part of the black blood seems to flow from the breasts and broken-open chest of the mother: motherhood and innocence destroyed—more than a broken heart.
King Kong is a fundamentally disturbing work, less beautiful than Picasso’s Guernica, but, to me, as powerful, even if less iconic. King Kong is a statement of society. In the film, people killed the gentle (until aggravated) misunderstood monster, raising the question of who the monster is. In these times of resurgent militarism, war, aggression, and unspeakable suffering in Ukraine, Gaza and Israel, Sudan, Ethiopia, Yemen, DR Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, across part of the Sahel… the list goes on unfortunately… we need more leaders to look at works of art like King Kong and choose a different path. The right road, unfortunately, has not been taken, and history repeats itself. Niki de Saint Phalle also presents society with a choice: the joy of life, embodied in the colourful, expansive, dancing woman, and the spiral of death that leaders have too often chosen.
The exhibition – Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hultén is on at the Grand Palais (Champs-Élysées Galleries) until 4 January. There is not much time left, but it is more than worth the visit. We live in anxious, heavy times. Art can shed a useful light on our predicament and choices.
