Nikki De Saint Phalle
Adam and Eve, 1989
Artwork Brief Description
Saint Phalle’s vibrant, voluptuous *Adam and Eve* reinterprets the biblical tale with a playful, feminist lens. Unlike traditional depictions emphasizing shame and sin, her figures are joyful, colorful, and free of judgment. The bright, rounded forms and patterns embody Saint Phalle’s signature style, reflecting her mission to reimagine historical narratives through female empowerment. The work is a continuation of her large-scale *Tarot Garden* project, where mythology and contemporary sensibilities merge.
Niki de Saint Phalle (French: [niki d(ə) sɛ̃ fal]; born Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle; 29 October 1930 – 21 May 2002) was a French sculptor, painter, filmmaker, and author of colorful hand-illustrated books. Widely noted as one of the few female monumental sculptors, Saint Phalle was also known for her social commitment and work.
She had a difficult and traumatic childhood and a much-disrupted education, which she wrote about many decades later. After an early marriage and two children, she began creating art in a naïve, experimental style. She first received worldwide attention for angry, violent assemblages which had been shot by firearms. These evolved into Nanas, light-hearted, whimsical, colorful, large-scale sculptures of animals, monsters, and female figures. Her most comprehensive work was the Tarot Garden, a large sculpture garden containing numerous works ranging up to house-sized creations.
Saint Phalle's idiosyncratic style has been called "outsider art"; she had no formal training in art, but associated freely with many other contemporary artists, writers, and composers. Her books and abundant correspondence were written and brightly-colored in a childish style, but throughout her lifetime she addressed many controversial and important global problems in the bold way children often use to question and call out unacceptable neglect.
Throughout her creative career, she collaborated with other well-known artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, composer John Cage, and architect Mario Botta, as well as dozens of less-known artists and craftspersons. For several decades, she worked especially closely with Swiss kinetic artist Jean Tinguely, who also became her second husband. In her later years, she suffered from multiple chronic health problems attributed to repeated exposure to airborne glass fibers and petrochemical fumes from the experimental materials she had used in her pioneering artworks, but she continued to create prolifically until the end of her life.
A critic has observed that Saint Phalle's "insistence on exuberance, emotion and sensuality, her pursuit of the figurative and her bold use of color have not endeared her to everyone in a minimalist age". She was well known in Europe,
but her work was little-seen in the US, until her final years in San Diego. Another critic said: "The French-born, American-raised artist is one of the most significant female and feminist artists of the 20th century, and one of the few to receive recognition in the male-dominated art world during her lifetime"
Niki De Saint Phalle (French American 1930-2002) Adam and Eve, 1989
The instantly recognisable form of Adam and Eve has been joyfully rendered by the talented French artist, Niki de Saint Phalle. When approaching the sculpture from the highest point of the garden we are presented with Eve’s perfectly rounded buttocks; their circular form is accentuated further through the positioning of two bright coloured flowers on each cheek. First conceived in 1989 this sculpture is one of the most important from Saint Phalle’s oeuvre. It has been created in her signature style with voluptuously curvy bodies, rounded limbs and bright colourful patinas.
Whilst the biblical tale of Adam and Eve that this work references is filled with warnings of temptation and the ultimate original sin, Saint Phalle retells the story in a more playful manner than artists have done previously. The creation myth presented in the Bible tells the tale of Adam and Eve being the first man and woman on Earth, created in God’s image. They are innocent, naked and embarrassed about being so. Adam is told that they can eat freely from the garden of Eden, apart from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. However, a serpent convinced Eve to eat an apple from the forbidden tree, some of which she passed to Adam.
Rubens famously depicted this scene in 1628 and called it “The Fall of Man”, for from that point onwards Adam and Eve were no longer innocent but filled with shame and evil from their disobeying of God’s orders. Notably, the title “Fall of Man” is inherently sexist, and implies that the culpability lies on Eve for corrupting mankind.
This sense of shame and foreboding has vanished from Saint Phalle’s sculpture. The almost childlike quality to the forms and the bright primary colours combined with the expressionless faces allow us to reconsider the age-old story in a different light. Even the serpent, white in colour, does not seem vicious or threatening. This concept was key to Saint Phalle who was constantly trying to re-interpret images and stories from the past through a female lens:
"In the field of art, men have exhausted everything, and it is now up to women to create something new."
Niki de Saint Phalle was very much a pioneer of her time. She was the only female member of the New Realist Art Movement and although made in 1989 her works are both timeless and ahead of their time, contemporary in their feel even today.
In 1979, ten years before this sculpture was conceived Saint Phalle began work on her biggest project, a monumental sculpture park called The Tarot Garden. Located in Tuscany, Italy, the garden contains oversized “nana” sculptures of the symbols found on Tarot cards. Each sculpture was created in Saint Phalle’s signature style, just like Adam and Eve.