New Mexico Sunset, an illuminated letter by Niki de Saint Phalle

9 7/8” x 14 1/8” (250 x 360 mm) - Framed: 15 1/8” x 19” (38.5 x 48.5 cm)
Signed "Niki" lower right and on the verso
Provenance: Descendants of Frédéric Rossif (1922 - 1990)

In this thank-you letter sent to the filmmaker Frédéric Rossif, Niki de Saint-Phalle expresses all her creativity, not only by multiplying the snake motifs - the animal that symbolizes her childhood wounds - but also by wrapping the sentences around various images inspired by her trip to New Mexico, which often have a very special resonance for her. Thanks to these miniatures, the letter becomes a work-of-art, giving us a glimpse into the artist's innermost being, revealing both her fragility and her fierce determination to overcome the past.

1. Niki de Saint-Phalle, a major female artist of the 20th century

Niki de Saint-Phalle (1930-2002) is one of the most important Franco-American artists of the 20th century.

From the start of her career in the 1950s, Niki de Saint Phalle defied artistic convention, creating works that were openly feminist, performative, collaborative and monumental. In France, she joined the Nouveaux Réalistes group in the early 60s, where she met the Swiss-born sculptor Jean Tinguely who became her second husband in 1971.
From the very beginning Saint Phalle went against accepted artistic norms, creating artworks that employed assemblage and performative modes of production - her famous Tirs (Shots) - as well as large-scale female sculptures called Nanas. From the late 1960s, Saint Phalle extended her practice to visionary architectural projects, sculpture gardens, books, prints, films, theater sets, clothing, jewelry and, of course, her own perfume.

Her sculptures can be found in public places all over Europe, including the Stravinsky Fountain (1983) adjacent to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. But Niki de Saint Phalle also produces fantastic and figurative houses, parks and playgrounds. At the heart of this vision is the Tarot Garden, a massive sculptural installation in Tuscany (a project which is mentioned in this letter), the foundations for which were laid in 1978. The intricate details and organic forms of the garden's structures, based on the 22 major arcana of the Tarot deck, underline Niki de Saint Phalle's conviction that art can alter perception and change reality.

Niki de Saint Phalle, who moved to the United States in 1994, also took an interest in the major political and social issues of her time. Tackling subjects ranging from women's rights to climate change and HIV/AIDS awareness, she was often at the forefront of the questioning of her time.

2. Niki de Saint-Phalle and the cinema

Like other Nouveaux Réalistes (Martial Raysse, Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé), Niki de Saint Phalle became interested in cinema. Although her Nana Island project never got beyond the script stage, in 1972 she began shooting Daddy. Beginning as a bedtime story, the film recounts in black-and-white flashbacks the disturbing, incestuous games of a father with his daughter, with a depressed version of My Heart Belongs to Daddy as a soundtrack. The second part of the film is dedicated to the daughter's revenge, once she becomes an adult (in color).

This violent, exutatory tale is a symbolic killing of her father by the artist which goes beyond biography, blending Niki's memories with the obsessions of her co-director Peter Whitehead. The film was shown in 1973 at MoMA in New York, then in Paris, and shocked audiences with both its subject matter and its violence.

She then embarked on the script for Camélia et le dragon (Camelia and the Dragon), eventually entitled Un rêve plus long que la nuit (A Dream longer than the Night), an initiatory tale of a young girl in search of love. The film which is a succession of dreamlike, surrealistic adventures received little success. The Niki Charitable Art Foundation website indicates that Frédéric Rossif co-directed this film in 1976 with Niki de Saint-Phalle. He was a documentary filmmaker and director who specialized in wildlife documentaries and montage documentaries with archival footage, but also made several cinematic portraits of artists. We believe, therefore, that our letter dates from 1975 or 1976, and bears witness to Frédéric Rossif's support in the run-up to this film.

This dating is consistent with the allusion to a sculpture garden project. The Tarot Garden project matured over several years after her meeting with Marella Agnelli in 1974 (whose family offered her the land on which the garden would be built), before the laying of the first foundations in 1978.

Niki de Saint-Phalle's last film was an animated adaptation of her 1990 book Le sida, tu ne l'attraperas pas (AIDS, you won’t get it).

3. A set of illuminations that symbolize the artist's wounds, but also (and above all) her resilience

The seemingly innocuous miniatures that dot this letter reveal the wounds that obsessively haunt the artist, but above all symbolize her pride in having overcome them.

The snake theme, announced from the very first letters with their ringed shapes, dominates this correspondence: a snake coils at the heart of the page around an oval shape; six or seven snake heads create a kind of chimeric creature, while a long snake with a body meticulously illuminated with psychedelic motifs meanders at the foot of the "New Mexico Sunset" mountains. The writing, in turn, becomes sinuous; as if by an association of ideas, the sentences wrap themselves around the images, fragmenting the text into several pieces that can be read randomly.

For Niki de Saint Phalle, the motif of the snake, a disquieting figure that often appears in her work, evokes the summer when she was abused by her father at the age of 11, a memory also associated with her encounter with menacing reptiles. The artist reveals her dark side in her book Mon secret (My secret): "A thick, seductive calm enveloped my walk through the fields (...) a large grey rock blocking my path was too big to be ignored. Intertwined at the top, two opulent black snakes, with their deadly venom, moved gently. I stopped in terror; I didn't dare move or breathe." The book in which she recalls this tragedy is subtitled L'été des serpents (Summer of Snakes), illustrating the metonymic dimension that snakes would gain in Niki de Saint Phalle's mental universe.

By the repetitive use of snake representations in her artworks, Niki de Saint Phalle sought to overcome her phobia, exorcise this painful period, and overcome her childhood terrors and wounds. "By making snakes myself, I was able to transform my fear of them into joy. Through my art, I learned to tame and tame again these creatures that terrorized me." The three snake images represented here can perhaps be understood as the symbols of three stages in her psychoanalytical journey. The snake coiled on a stone with its head turned to the left, i.e. towards her past, symbolizes the terror of the rape, reminding her of that incestuous summer. The chimerical creature that seems to be struggling before our eyes symbolizes the rebellion and the fight against her own fears. The snake with its wonderfully decorated body that moves away to the right, i.e. towards her future, symbolizes the achievement of her self-control.

The scorpion on the left, designated by its Latin name - also used in astrology - scorpio, also takes on a particular autobiographical dimension when we remember that our artist was born on October 29, under the sign of Scorpio ascendant Scorpio! Niki de Saint Phalle has always proudly claimed her astrological Scorpio belonging, as if to justify her folie des grandeurs, her revolt against the world of men, her pugnacity and her excesses. In one of her autobiographies, she wrote: "My astrological sign is double Scorpio, a sign for overcoming obstacles. I learned to love obstacles".

A final motif, the desert flower, seems to us to be a cryptic portrait of the artist, even if it also refers, like the scorpion, to the environment of New Mexico. While its corolla evokes the shape of a vagina, suspended from a frail stem, its name could symbolize the loneliness of the abused girl who has no one to confide her dark secret to. In this context, the sentence "I'm learning karate", inscribed underneath like a caption, sums up her determination to take control of her life and never be a victim anymore.

4. Framing

We have chosen to frame this drawing in an Italian blackened wood frame, decorated with waves motifs whose undulations evoke the sinuous patterns of the snakes that populate this illuminated letter.