24/6/02

Obituary: Niki de Saint Phalle

Niki de Saint Phalle has died in California, at the age of 71. Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, she was moved by her parents to New York, her mother’s home city, in l937. More ‘Nouveau Realiste’ than a true Pop artist, she was influenced by Rauschenberg and Johns, and took to a form of collaged sculptural objects, She admitted to a fundamental influence, the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi’s great building in Barcelona, and made ugliness into an aesthetic that won hearts. In the mid-l950s she met Tinguely in Paris, and they married as two sculptors of common language. Outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris there still lingers their joint fountain in honour of Stravinsky.