What Is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)Biography of Niki de Saint Phalle - by Nicole Rudick (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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 and 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 remarkable life as an artist who pointedly challenged taboos. In a kind of collaboration with the artist, Nicole Rudick 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Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches, and writings, many rare or previously unpublished. These confessions, declarations, meditations, and musings trace the most intimate contours of Saint Phalle's life. In some works, Saint Phalle articulates herself with startling candor and self-examination; in others, she carefully and slowly unwinds her secrets as she herself wrestles with them. Throughout, her agency in telling her own story is paramount."--

Book Synopsis

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of Saint Phalle's visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy.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).

Review Quotes

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.--Jillian Steinhauer "The Nation"

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.--Jackson Davidow "Los Angeles Review of Books"

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.--Lauren Moya Ford "Hyperallergic"

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.--Jennifer Krasinski "Bookforum"