Niki de Saint Phalle hated laundry. When she was twelve years old, there was a decisive moment in the linen closet with her mother. ‘She was counting out the sheets and the towels,’ the artist later recalled. ‘I will never do that, I told her… Never will I spend time doing anything like that.’Niki de Saint Phalle, ‘Feminism’ [undated] in Nicole Rudick, What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography by Niki de Saint Phalle (New York: Siglio Press, 2022), 128. This was the Upper East Side in the 1940s: her mother slapped her for her impertinence. That act of discipline was not to be replicated by Saint Phalle, either. When she was thirty, she left her daughter, Laura, not yet ten, with her first husband. She didn’t want to be a mother or a wife. ‘[Mother’s] kingdom was her house and I wanted a larger kingdom,’ Saint Phalle once declared in an autobiographical text titled, simply, ‘Feminism’. Whatever she wanted to do, she wanted it to be ‘difficult, exciting, grand’.Saint Phalle, ‘Dear Mother’ [1992] in What Is Now Known, 19.

Art was what Saint Phalle wanted and, in pursuit of it, she was not afraid to throw the baby out with the bathwater, or to leave Laura behind with the laundry. ‘WORK WORK WORK,’ she wrote in later life: ‘It’s my obsession and my destiny.’Saint Phalle, ‘Niki by Niki’ [c. mid-1980s] in What Is Now Known, 150. That defiant commitment to making art involved serious sacrifices and a series of mental and physical illnesses, but whatever the work was, it was far from the tedium of counting sheets and towels. It was exciting. It was grand. After she found fame as an artist in the 1960s making explosive canvases and enormous sculptures, she went on to make a film, Un rêve plus long que la nuit (A Dream Longer Than the Night, 1976), where the fun of dreaming is extended so that it might outlast the secretive night. By that time, Saint Phalle had been on the run from the family unit for years, having been indelibly marked by a childhood of abuse (one which went far beyond that linen closet slap). Domesticity and the nuclear family function as antagonists across her knotty work and, in 1992, she wrote about how she wanted ‘to teach children how to protect themselves’ from adults.Saint Phalle, ‘Dear Laura’ [1992] in What Is Now Known, 222. In this spirit, recent books published for children about her art suggest, for example, that popping balloons filled with paint – as Saint Phalle did in various works – might help with managing anger. ‘Bang!’Ulrich Kempel, Niki’s World (Prestel, 2004), 20. In Un rêve, meanwhile, the artist had realised and protected the fantasy of many quixotic little girls: to grow up, find true love, and go happily into the sunset – one which is all rouged with the promise of the unknown. Here, the prison sentence of mid-century domesticity is nowhere on the horizon.

Born in 1930, Saint Phalle struggled against feminine norms throughout her childhood and into her troubled twenties. André-Marie Fal de Saint Phalle and Jeanne Jacqueline Harper, an aristocratic French stockbroker and an American woman of means, raised Saint Phalle and her siblings Roman Catholic. Saint Phalle revered Joan of Arc, and was the sort of rule-breaking girl who snogged handfuls of classmates, smoked and drank between lessons, and defaced pompous statues. She was expelled from three separate private schools. One of those schools did, however, make an avowed feminist of little Saint Phalle, instilling in her the notion that women could, and should, achieve great things. That confidence, combined with social status and good looks, led Saint Phalle to model for the respectable pages of Life and Vogue. Then, at nineteen, she eloped to Europe with Harry Mathews, a like-minded romantic similarly stifled by America and its bourgeoisie.

Marriage between the couple meant a lot of work – the work of writing, the work of painting – which was just how Saint Phalle liked it. Mathews (who went on to be associated with the poets John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler, and the Oulipo group in France) said that he had ‘followed her energetic example’ when he began writing in the 1950s.Harry Mathews, ‘Living with Niki’, Tate Etc. 12 (January 2008): https://tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-12-spring-2008/living-niki. Saint Phalle had begun painting at that time – an autodidact in this particular métier, and proud of it. But when she was twenty, laundry reared its exasperating head once more. After Laura was born (and apparently named after the ‘terribly seductive and exciting’ woman played by Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger’s Laura), Mathews bought his restless wife a washing machine.Saint Phalle, [text unattributed], What Is Now Known, 34. Saint Phalle later wrote of that misguided gift,

This was not at all what I thought marriage should be like. […] Little by little, I took our dirty clothes and hid them under our bed, where they slowly accumulated… and I waited until Harry declared he had no more clothes to wear. Then I led him to our room and lifted the corner of the bedspread to reveal the secret pile that had amassed beneath the bed. I sighed, “I can’t do this, Harry… it’s just too boring.” He did not seem at all surprised by my revelation.ibid.

Two years after that, Saint Phalle had a nervous breakdown. She received electroshock treatments in hospital, and there she instinctively turned to art for less terrifying therapy, making collages from natural materials she found around the hospital grounds. Seven years after that, she abandoned the tedium of laundry and the nuclear family for good and, resolving that she would give herself ‘a good reason to feel guilty’, dedicated herself entirely to art.Saint Phalle, ‘Dear Mother’ in What Is Now Known, 21.

Throughout the 1960s, she lived and worked between New York and Europe with the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely and mounted two series of ambitious works. Both the Tirs and the Nanas were the antithesis of the linen closet and its prim tidiness – the secret pile beneath the bed made into art. Anything conventional was ruptured. Anything constricting was turned inside out. In the Tirs series, Saint Phalle muddled together abstract expressionism’s splatters of colour with the clutter of assemblage art and the daring of performance art. On large canvases, beneath white plaster, she submerged bags of paint along with foodstuff and household objects, and then took fire at them. (And so tirs, the French for ‘shots’.) The striking image of Saint Phalle with a gun rocketed her to fame. You can imagine what her mother might have thought, however, about all that alabaster become chaotic mess.

Where the Tirs were eruptive, the Nanas that followed were elephantine. Named for the French slang word for women (an equivalent of ‘girls’, ‘dolls’, or ‘chicks’), these sculptures look like anti-Barbies: motivated not by anxious realism – a desire to represent us as we really are, warts and all – but by boundless joy. Vibrantly rotund and gravity-defying, the Nanas series shares some of the bright, looping tendencies of Saint Phalle’s childlike works on paper, capturing enormous feminine forms mid-whoop, mid-leap, in flight.

Saint Phalle was often commissioned during her lifetime to populate public spaces across the world with Nanas (spot them, for example, outside Paris’s Centre Pompidou or Stockholm’s Moderna Museet). And, in the early 1970s, she wanted to make a film called ‘Nana Island’: she wrote the script, she constructed the sets, and began filming, but it was never finished. One friend and collaborator described the matriarchal landscape of the shoot, and remembered a war of the sexes unfolding between performers in ‘extravagant wigs’ if they were women and army helmets if they were men; the women were accompanied by Nanas, and the men, by an arsenal of cannons and tanks designed by Tinguely.Patty Mucha quoted in Alissa Clarke, Feminist Media Histories 5/2 (Spring 2019): 172. Something like this surfaced later in Un rêve – but before Saint Phalle arrived at that, she created her first feature, Daddy (1973), in the sticky spirit of catharsis that earlier oozed across the Tirs series. Working with the filmmaker Peter Whitehead to reckon with the sexual abuse she experienced from age eleven at the hands of her father, who had died in 1967, Saint Phalle scandalised critics with this mad, incestuous film (but found a fan in Jacques Lacan).“Jacques Lacan stood up for me,” Saint Phalle claimed in 1992 [‘Dear Laura’ in What is Now Known, 220]. See also articles on Daddy by Joanna Bourke in Framework 52/2 (Fall 2011): 622-647 and Alissa Clarke in Feminist Media Histories 5/2 (Spring 2019): 148-180. Saint Phalle stars in Daddy as a delirious version of her prepubescent self; she and the Daddy character act out a scarring scene of abuse from Saint Phalle’s childhood. André-Marie would instigate a game called ‘Blind Man’, with the blindfold a pretext for him to molest his daughter. In the fantasies of the film, Saint Phalle debases him and kills him.

Spurred on by antiwar, feminist sentiment of the time, Whitehead and Saint Phalle make Daddy both an avatar for her father and symbolic of the patriarchy generally. (It is something that widens the scope of Daddy beyond the rather prettier and more lovely fairytale of Jacques Demy’s Peau d’âne [1970], which threatens father-daughter incest but has its fairy godmother, played by Delphine Seyrig, there to advise against it.) Saint Phalle’s film tells us that Daddy invented cars and missiles. He erected cathedrals and went to war. He can even write a decent poem. But Daddy fails on one front. He cannot make a happy, healthy baby. In an effeminate, humiliated state towards the end of the film, Daddy births deformed dolls as Saint Phalle looks on, laughing. Disturbing though it is, it is a great image for how poisonous patriarchal structures can be – contaminating the dreams of its daughters, trapping them in nightmares of revenge. Where Saint Phalle had brought the Tirs series to an end because she had started to enjoy the ferocity of it too much (‘I was shaking… I was addicted… I could have spent my whole life doing it’),[editor’s translation] “Niki de Saint Phalle, artiste solaire et engagée : L'expérience du rire”, France Culture, 27 May 2002. Daddy was more extreme, culminating in another nervous breakdown.She wrote that she fantasised about committing “the perfect suicide” while in hospital in Switzerland, dreaming of walking into the glacial landscape after her last meal—caviar and Dom Perignon (you can take the girl out of private school, etc.)—and being found there, beautiful and frozen. [Saint Phalle, ‘Chère Marina’ [1992] in What is Now Known, 123.] I wasn’t surprised when I read this. Although the elaborate costumes are marvellous, and the film often topples over into wicked, incisive humor, it is discomfiting to watch Saint Phalle regurgitate, for 82 minutes, the abuse to which she was once subjected. She wanted to teach children how to protect themselves from adults, but these were images of how children become monsters too.

Girlhood is asphyxiated in Daddy, a film of only pyrrhic victories. Saint Phalle’s second feature film is a happier story: a fairytale of nascent femininity in which desire is not set in stone, not fated to miserable repetition. Un rêve is gargantuan in imagination; Amy Taubin has crowned it a ‘masterpiece’, calling for it to be included in the ‘Essential Cinema’ series at Anthology in New York.Amy Taubin, ‘Shadow Play’, Artforum, 29 January 2019. No luck so far, however – and little else is written about the film in English, despite a new restoration, which played at Il Cinema Ritrovato and New York Film Festival in 2023.Grace Byron has written about the New York Film Festival screening [Screen Slate, 3 October 2023]. Peter Whitehead also briefly discusses Un rêve in an interview with Virginie Sélavy [Electric Sheep, 30 January 2015]. In Nicole Rudick’s (Auto)biography of Saint Phalle, it is mentioned only once. We might ask why it has been met with relatively little enthusiasm.That Saint Phalle was, until these restorations, an artist little known in the current cinephile scene might be one factor, although she did move in and around film circles during her lifetime. She was Robert Bresson’s first choice for Guinevere in his Lancelot du Lac (1974). Marguerite Duras at one point imagined her playing une femme en noir in India Song (1975). [See Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Rattle of Armour, the Softness of Flesh: Lancelot du Lac’, Sight & Sound (Summer 1974)and Marguerite Duras, ‘Delving into the forgotten’ [1975], My Cinema,trans. Daniella Shreir (London: Another Gaze Editions, 2024), 108.] Whatever the reason, when I watch Un rêve now, it looks like Catherine Breillat’s and Lucile Hadžihalilović’s fairytales avant la lettre: same undercurrents of shadowiness, same incredible understanding of girls’ desires. Of Saint Phalle’s contemporaries, Ulrike Ottinger’s cinema, with all its joyously gaudy handmade spectacle, comes to mind. Like those three filmmakers, Saint Phalle envisions an explicitly feminine realm, one that accommodates both darkness and wonder.

It starts, unnervingly, with scenes reminiscent of Daddy. In a pastoral setting, a blindfolded girl plays with two men – but the game is benign. Green innocence is kept intact. Saint Phalle carries into Un rêve less from Daddy and more from her artist’s books, filled with their intricate mythology of companion dragons and fearsome snakes, decorated with love hearts and punctuated with curious, open questions in curlicued handwriting. (My Love, Where Shall We Make Love?, published in 1971, asks candidly whether a bed, a field of flowers, or the top of the sun would be the most appropriate place for fornicating; this spirit of inexhaustible exploration ripples across Un rêve.) Casting off the sacrilegious iconoclasm of Daddy, Saint Phalle starts to thread cartomantic characters from the Major Arcana – the Hermit, the Lovers, and the Sorceress; Death and the Moon – into her imaginary here (and these reappear in the Tarot Garden, Saint Phalle’s Gesamtkunstwerk sculpture garden in Tuscany, which she started just after Un rêve in 1978 and finished in 1998). While Daddy comes close to filmed performance – not too much concerned with cinematographic flair, as if letting us stare, open-mouthed and unmoving, at what is happening before the camera – Un rêve owes much more to the language of cinema: a battle scene makes good use of montage, and other passages, of mirrors, and a handheld camera conveys tentative movements into a weird new world.

Camelia, the Hermit and the heroine of the film, is put to bed in the prologue by her harmless father. She surfaces in the eponymous dream, ‘longer than night’, finding herself sitting on a coiled, golden throne. Wandering into multicoloured gardens of other anfractuous Saint Phalle sculptures, Camelia encounters The Sorceress, with whom she is to “go through Death” in order to “make the Moon” and find true love. With their squiggling, irregular structures (‘I don’t like right angles,’ wrote Saint Phalle, ‘My cercles [sic.] are never perfect. This is my choice.’)Saint Phalle, [work unattributed], What Is Now Known, 107-108. and a confection of bright colours, these scenes already extend exuberant, polymorphic invitations to pleasure.

Camelia asks the Sorceress to transform her into a beautiful woman, and is granted her precocious wish. Moving after that from the playground of childhood into the domain of adulthood, she enters a big, creaking iron structure (one of Tinguely’s sets) with an air of evil to it. Saint Phalle’s guileless thinking can be crude and confused, and that much is true for this chapter of the film: bad men don’t speak French but German, and a desperate merchant who tries to sell death and war to an army general is bluntly coded as Jewish. Yet, elsewhere, Saint Phalle’s coarseness can be funny. Malevolence is also (why not!) the act of spit-roasting a baby doll, growling while feasting on it foot-first.

Transformed from girl to woman (and with the glittery eyeshadow to prove it), Camelia continues onwards in search of true love. Soon, she crosses paths with a madame who “runs a boarding school for girls” – a character played by Saint Phalle in a slinky, sheer jumpsuit. Where the filmmaker’s character in Daddy eventually grooms another girl for the eponymous creep, her character in Un rêve offers Camelia a smorgasbord of sexual possibilities without pressure. Camelia is free to choose or not to choose from a procession of men. Some are silvery, lizard-like, and ladened with chains. Many are adorned with comic phalluses that burst, on climax, with confetti semen. Fawning over Camelia in a sequined sleepover, a group of gorgeous women might seem the most tantalising. (Saint Phalle had affairs with women, most notably with Clarice Rivers, whom she considered her muse.) In these scenes, Un rêve flirts with homosexuality, yet takes the threat out of men and the prospect of heterosexuality too – and without the recourse to humiliation that festers across Daddy.

Compared with the pessimism of Daddy– in which trauma squalidly repeats itself, tragedy souring into farce – these images of erotic exploration are happily juvenile, lovely and silly. Saint Phalle had, as she wrote later in her autobiography, Traces (1999), ‘transformed fear into joy’. In that text, she resolved, ‘I have learned through my art to tame the things that scare me.’Saint Phalle, excerpt from Traces [1999] in What Is Now Known, 147. These scenes in Un rêve may also feel profound because older Camelia is played by Laura Condominas. Condominas was married to Laurent Condominas (part of the Zanzibar Group of filmmakers, along with Philippe Garrel and Jackie Raynal), and played Guinevere in Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974); she is also the Laura whom Saint Phalle left for ‘difficult, exciting, grand’ a decade and a half before.

Writing in one artist’s book about succumbing to that temptation, Saint Phalle describes, in typical storybook mode, work as an irresistible paramour who is ‘always there waiting’ for her. Tall and elegant, he wears a black cape like Dracula. Work has emerald eyes: he remains jealous for every moment she is away from him. Whenever he is near, he likes to whisper in her ear: there is not much time left for you to do what you are meant to do. As Saint Phalle narrates the scene, he flies through an open window in the dark of night and she shivers, then succumbs, as he wraps her in his wings. ‘I AM HIS.’Saint Phalle, [work unattributed], What Is Now Known, 156–157. Laura, laundry – none of it could compete.

Saint Phalle releases various dark-feathered, winged figures into Un rêve, and presents Condominas’s character with her own version of a man in black. He lurks alongside the Sorceress in several scenes, biding his time while Camelia sees the quest narrative through. What ‘true love’ he might represent for her – work, romance – is left an open question, but I found seeing them united at the end of the film very moving, knowing Saint Phalle and Condominas’s shared history, and how important this sort of seductive figure was to Saint Phalle.

What is repeated between parent and child now is the freedom to explore desire, the desire that comes from outside domesticity and the nuclear family, rather than the desire that has gone bad within those walls. In the war of the sexes at the end of Un rêve, Camelia does not participate, and comes out unscathed. Our passions are invited to come before our inherited narratives in Saint Phalle’s hopeful, excitable and fidgety imagination.

Between them, the Tirs, the Nanas and Daddy are grand, exciting, and difficult works. It might sound trite or obvious from the perspective of the 2020s – and maybe Un rêve’s restoration came too late in this feminist cycle to be at all revelatory in this way – but all the same: I wonder whether another difficult, exciting, and grand thing Saint Phalle did was to break a cycle of neglect and abuse, so typical of the twentieth-century family. On individual and wider societal fronts, that was no minor feat. She found a positive space for her daughter in the world of art, in so doing bridging a sprawling, singular creative impulse with a maternal one. She offered cinema a distinctive vision – optimistic but not sanitised – of coming of age too. What if little girls’ sexual awakening weren’t subject to trauma, and could be funny, fun, and actually sexy instead?

After decades of artmaking on a mammoth scale, Saint Phalle died in 2002. Writing about her mother in 2008, Condominas said that it was ‘quite dramatic’ for Saint Phalle to leave her when she was little. Yet she came to understand and to share in her need for creative freedom. Condominas concludes, ‘She was a terrific mother.’Laura Gabriel [Condominas], ‘My Terrific Mother’,Tate Etc. 12 (January 2008).