The Missouri Botanical Garden has had a visitor for some time now like none it has ever had before. Here name is Niki de Saint Phalle, and she is one of the most famous artists of the 20th century.
She was born in 1930 and raised in high society both in New York and France. In the early fifties she settled in Paris with an American husband and became both a wife and a mother. During this period she also graced the covers of Elle, Life and Vogue as a top fashion model.
Then, inexplicably, at 22 she collapsed and had a complete nervous breakdown. She was asylumed and electro-shocked. We don’t know what initiated this trauma. We do know that Niki de Saint Phalle emerged as a new person. She was suddenly a person who used her intuition and her senses in a new and non-rational way. She became a being obsessed n by art.
Some of the products of that grand obsession are here in St. Louis, in a show n Niki in the Garden n that closes Oct. 31. Two of the most compelling are called the Nanas and the Black Heroes.
The Nanas, a French slang term that means “chick” or “babe,” are a series of black and white robust female forms that pay homage to the vital energy of women regardless of race or class or creed.
Niki, obeying a visionary instinctual drive that is a natural part of her love of life, created the Nanas at first as personal translation of the freedom gained after her breakdown from the restrictions of religious schooling and social status of her youth. Later the Nanas came to symbolize the free rein of imagination she saw in the world of art and the unlimited possibilities that this freedom of imagination prophesized for women.
Walking around the Missouri Botanical Garden, one doesn’t immediately get the depth or the seriousness of Niki’s art. If you return a second time you begin to feel that there is something going on behind and beyond the children playing in the great skull of La Cabeza, or the adults staring and admiring the magnificent mosaic-encrusted Temple fronting and guarding the Garden’s climatron.
On the third visit you might notice a chrome skull simply titled Death hidden deep inside the climatron. It’s covered by the kind of foliage we associate with idyllic places n arcadia or, perhaps, paradise. It’s a story as old as any ancient text and Niki’s seemingly playful creation tells this story. It’s a clear, deep and ruthlessly consistent story. A beautiful start passes to a complex middle coming to a deep end.
Hon, the monumental Nana she created in 1966 for Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (Museum of Modern Art), represents the culmination of the series. A great and imposing sculpture of a woman is positioned to give birth. This great Nana sequences perfectly with Niki’s global vision of the female form as giver of life and celebration of what she sees as entrance to a new age of equality between man and woman.
Black Heroes
The last Nana leads us inevitably forward to the formation of the Black Heroes.
Nikki remembered vividly growing up in a world where she had no heroic figures as point or frame of reference. She has a great grandson, Djamal, who is a bi-racial child. While living in San Diego in 1998, she considered the world that her great-grandson was living in. Determined to provide for him the points of reference she never had, she began thinking in terms of a series of heroic Nana-like forms of heroic cultural and social stature. Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, Miles Davis, Tony Gwynn, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods comprise these heroes.
The most impressive of these pieces are Louis and Miles. I encountered them the first time I saw Niki’s show in the middle of a Saturday afternoon near the band stage when there were very few people around. They stood like lonely twin sentinels guarding the gate to the music.
Armstrong, with his multi-colored mosaic tuxedo jacket, stood to the left of the bandstand like a sweet, diminutive, ever so slightly pot-bellied Gabriel announcing the long hot song of the 20th century.
Miles stood at stage right, his most striking sculptural element being blood orange red hair that fit him like an ancient Babylonian skull cap or maybe a custom hoodie from the vaults of Pierre Cardin.
Two weeks later I was back at the same spot for an evening of music in the Garden’s Whitaker concert series. Miles and Louis were in their respective places, only their roles seemed reversed.
Louis, at the left, seemed more spectacular now because he had attracted a huge and glowing crowd. A bag lady-cum ballerina danced in front of his upraised horn for an hour. Children buzzed at his feet and flattened the grass in front of him with their piercing and joyous kid screams.
Miles, on the other hand, now seemed incredibly remote from the populace and from the pleasant pop music. His red skull cap seemed to scare people away; his blackness seemed to be a screen that covered his vitality; but, he seemed perversely pleased by it all, still crazy and in charge after all these years.
Tiger Woods and Tony Gwynn, placed in a more open space, a flat meadow further south on the grounds, seemed more conventional. Their place in the culture of Black Heroes is less fixed, more contemporary and therefore less mythic, but they held their own. Niki had caught the one gesture that made them real. Michael Jordan, his Airness, seemed the most ordinary and least interesting because of the roundness of the form Niki had given him. Leanness is almost a prerequisite for representing the nature of basketball and those who do it best, and Jordan’s likeness just didn’t work.
The one hero missing from the lineup is perhaps the one who most deserved to be here, Josephine Baker. A native daughter who left the homestead and became spectacularly successful, she has always had a love-hate relationship with St. Louis. I have seen Niki’s sculpture, and it is perhaps the most stunning of the Black Heroes. Maybe logistics, not politics, are the rule here. But, Le Josephine has on that skimpy banana dress that made her famous in Paris in the 20s. She’s also, in Niki’s vision, showing a whole lot of leg, thigh breast and butt. I wonder if she’s still just a little bit too much woman for the city of the French King.
The Missouri Botanical Garden is located at 4344 Shaw Blvd. Visit www.mobot.org or call the 24-hour Garden Line recording at (314) 577-9400 or 1-800-642-8842. The show closes Oct. 31.
