What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle
By Nicole Rudick.
A biography by Nicole Rudick told in Saint Phalle's own words, assembled from rare and unseen materials
Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance—a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle's voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle's life which she sometimes reveals with great candor, at other times carefully unwinding her secrets. Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Saint Phalle's invocation—her "bringing to life"—writes Rudick, "is an apt summation of the overlap of Saint Phalle’s life and art: both a bringing into existence and a bringing to bear. These are visions from the frontiers of consciousness."
Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was raised in New York and began making art at age 23, pursuing a revelatory vision informed both by the monumental works of Antonin Gaudí and the Facteur Cheval, and by aspects of her own life. In addition to her Tirs (“shooting paintings”) and Nanas and her celebrated large-scale projects—including the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, Golem in Jerusalem and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany—Saint Phalle produced writing and works on paper that delve into her own biography: childhood and her break with her family, marriage to Harry Mathews, motherhood, a long collaborative relationship with Jean Tinguely, numerous health crises and her late, productive years in Southern California. Saint Phalle has most recently been the subject of retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in 2015, and at MoMA P.S.1, in 2021.
Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature and comics has been published in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum and elsewhere. She was managing editor of the Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor, most recently, of a new edition of Gary Panter’s legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (New York Review Comics, 2021).
Featured image is reproduced from 'What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle'.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Hyperallergic
Lauren Moya Ford
The book follows her international journey weathering the highs and lows of being an artist, woman, friend, daughter, lover, and mother. The person who emerges is open, driven, and often remarkably perceptive about who she is and why.
Bookforum
Jennifer Krasinski
What Is Now Known also clarifies editing as a creative act rather than a definitive one. Saint Phalle wrote nothing for this book, and yet this book is written by her. Embracing that contradiction, Rudick enables the artist to speak for herself, as herself, once again.
The Nation
Jillian Steinhauer
As readers, we inhabit her consciousness—we grow and process with her...This is the greatest strength of What Is Now Known: It offers an intimate emotional portrait—an experiential biography, you might say—of Saint Phalle.
Los Angeles Review of Books
Jackson Davidow
Tracking Saint Phalle’s creative, personal, and professional odyssey from childhood to old age, with an emphasis on persistent themes of feminism, abuse, and illness, the book is just as much a testament to the willful production of artistic subjectivity as it is to the manifold powers of art as an instrument of therapy, education, and activism.
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Feeling inspired by the exhibition Niki de Saint Phalle in the 1960s, on view through July 17 at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, we are featuring a few spreads from What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined, Nicole Rudick's remarkable biography of the visionary French artist, assembled from Saint Phalle's paintings, drawings, sketches and writings—many of which are previously unpublished. "Put together, the distinct works in this book make a non-narrative story," Rudick writes. "I intend them to be read in sequence, cover to cover. Subjects recur and vibrate against and contradict one another. They make meaning through their contiguity, their role in a syntactic construction (each work a word in a sentence, a sentence in a paragraph, and so on). Certain emblematic images reappear, too—trees, monsters, snakes, birds—but shift in meaning, from iteration to iteration, as words do. Each work can be read and understood on its own, but when they come together, we get a bigger picture of Saint Phalle’s inner world. It is a picture I have put together, but who’s to say it wasn’t already there, just needed a different way of reading and looking? This book is an act of cooperation or participation between Saint Phalle and me, and the reader, too. A cooperative, to borrow from Roland Barthes: 'To the United Readers and Lovers.' It contains gaps and breaths, an abiding and uncertain openness that characterizes not only the progress of a conversation but the progress of living." continue to blog
What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle
Published by Siglio. By Nicole Rudick.
A biography by Nicole Rudick told in Saint Phalle's own words, assembled from rare and unseen materials
Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance—a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle's voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle's life which she sometimes reveals with great candor, at other times carefully unwinding her secrets. Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Saint Phalle's invocation—her "bringing to life"—writes Rudick, "is an apt summation of the overlap of Saint Phalle’s life and art: both a bringing into existence and a bringing to bear. These are visions from the frontiers of consciousness."
Born in France, Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) was raised in New York and began making art at age 23, pursuing a revelatory vision informed both by the monumental works of Antonin Gaudí and the Facteur Cheval, and by aspects of her own life. In addition to her Tirs (“shooting paintings”) and Nanas and her celebrated large-scale projects—including the Stravinsky Fountain at the Centre Pompidou, Golem in Jerusalem and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany—Saint Phalle produced writing and works on paper that delve into her own biography: childhood and her break with her family, marriage to Harry Mathews, motherhood, a long collaborative relationship with Jean Tinguely, numerous health crises and her late, productive years in Southern California. Saint Phalle has most recently been the subject of retrospectives at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in 2015, and at MoMA P.S.1, in 2021.
Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature and comics has been published in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum and elsewhere. She was managing editor of the Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor, most recently, of a new edition of Gary Panter’s legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (New York Review Comics, 2021).
