CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/23/2022

Readers and Lovers unite with Nicole Rudick's (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle

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French artist, assembled from Saint Phalle's paintings, drawings, sketches and writings—many of which are previously unpublished.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."