By Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), we often know the Tirs, these performances which made her famous in the 1960s. The Franco-American artist exteriorizes and sublimates, in this gesture which she assimilates to a “ victimless assassination”, the violence that inhabits it. We also know his Nanas, these giant and colorful dolls, rowdy and powerful, joyful and terrifying, always “one foot, two feet in the air”. “Suspended, you are less vulnerable,” remarks Nathalie Piégay, in the story she devotes to him. You protect, you dance, you dominate, you steal, you leave, you advance,” whereas, on “the ground, you can be touched, hit, targeted.”
Intrigued by this work about which she realizes that she knows little, the writer decides to follow in the footsteps of the visual artist, visiting the places where she lived and the spaces where her sculptures and those of her husband are exhibited. , the Swiss Jean Tinguely (1925-1991). The biographical story that she draws from it, to evoke the world “of madness, violence and revolt” to which the artistic experience of Niki de Saint Phalle opens up, is very interesting but perhaps a little wise. He changed his status when, thanks to a remark made to him by a friend, about a possible meeting between “Niki” and Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Nathalie Piégay decided to continue the research that she thought she had carried out. at their end.
3 girls. Saint Phalle, Bourgeois, Messager is thus a completely different book than the one we first thought we were reading. A triptych composed one thing leading to another, through chance and happy coincidences to which the writer suddenly becomes sensitive. Yielding to Niki de Saint Phalle's "forced obsessions" which besiege her and lead her to "want to know everything about life", she makes her biographical material the matrix of a study on the springs of artistic creation. Questioning the way in which Louise Bourgeois was able to invent “autobiographical sculpture”, she compares it to the way in which Niki de Saint Phalle created “from her personal history, which she projects into extraordinary characters”. Under the pen of Nathalie Piégay, the connection between the two artists seems clear. Both experienced, as she writes, “anguish, collapse, revolt against the father.” Taking up the mantra of Louise Bourgeois, for whom “art is a guarantee of sanity”, the writer sees, in “the strength they had to fight against the madness and the violence suffered”, the spring of their art.
