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To say that Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely had a tempestuous relationship is something of an understatement. The push and pull of their romantic and creative exchanges came to a crescendo across the latter half of the 20th century, as both artists refused to be tied to the conventions or moral imperatives of their day.
De Saint Phalle first met Tinguely in the milieu of the Parisian avant-garde. She was born on the outskirts of the city to a wealthy family, before moving with them to the USA when they fell on hard times. Despite her relative disdain for domesticity, she eloped to Cambridge, Massachusetts, with a childhood friend as a late teen in 1948 and soon felt utterly smothered by the expectations of matrimony and motherhood.
Following a peripatetic period travelling throughout Europe, De Saint Phalle suffered a nervous breakdown, and it was during her recovery that she truly found solace in painting. Her entirely self-taught style, with bold, curvaceous women as a central motif, was inspired by the organic forms of Antoni Gaudí, as well as the Pop-art appropriation of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.
She first gained some recognition – at least in close artistic circles – in the late 1950s, when she first encountered Tinguely. The Swiss sculptor is best known for his brashly industrial kinetic assemblages, which he dubbed ‘métamatics’. He might have been an unlikely mentor for an artist more concerned with mysticism and the fluidity of the female body, but his acute understanding of how to push her practice – particularly when it came to the translation of scale and sculptural dimensions – saw their relationship flourish.
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By 1960 both artists had separated from their previous partners, and formative collaborations in life and art ensued. They worked from a farmhouse in the French countryside, filling it with the scrap metal, plaster, paints and plastics that their work demanded. They preferred a place of solitude, where they could dedicate themselves to their art and minimise social demands.
That being said, by the time they married in 1971 both were already pursuing other romances, in a complex pattern of mutual understanding and jealousy that would last for years. ‘It was always an intense relationship’, says Bloum Cardenas, De Saint Phalle’s granddaughter and trustee of Niki Charitable Art Foundation. ‘When Jean first met her, a friend of his offered a warning: “that woman is all fire. If you don’t meet her with the same force, you will surely get burned!”’
Among their earliest truly collaborative works was Le Paradis Fantastique, an expansive sculptural installation commissioned by the French government for its pavilion at Montreal’s Universal Expo of 1967. The prevailing theme, of life confronted by the forces of destruction, was conveyed in the macabre sharpness of Tinguely’s mechanised structures, which appear to threaten and even outright attack De Saint Phalle’s joyous, colourful figures.
This tension persisted in subsequent collective works, which carry the distinct aesthetic of each artist within a strangely disruptive whole. Several of these pieces are on show in the new exhibition Myths and Machines at Hauser & Wirth in Somerset, which focuses on both their combined endeavours and the mutually supportive environment they fostered. For example, La Grand Tête (1988) features a gigantic face adorned with a crown of lightbulbs sitting atop a menacing amalgam of cogs and wheels. In Nana Dansant (Nana mobile) (1976), one of her famously bulbous figures once again appears on top of a fusion of metal and wire, like a surreal tree topper.
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Archival material on display also makes reference to Le Cyclop, a monumental sculpture installed in the woods of Milly-La-Forêt. Although it was originally conceived by Tinguely, a whole host of other artists became involved. The project took two decades, and after vandals graffitied and damaged the structure during the 1980s Tinguely became disenchanted. It was only through De Saint Phalle’s insistence, aided by the addition of a layer of mirrored mosaics (a technique she perfected while embarking on her exceptional Tarot Garden), that he was convinced to finish the endeavour.
‘She seduced him with his own work,’ says Cardenas. ‘She knew how to harness her own talent and charm to bring him back to where he needed to be.’ Tinguely himself went even further. For him, this seminal work was ‘a Niki de Saint Phalle idea above all’.
‘Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely: Myths and Machines’ runs at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, Bruton, until 1 Feb 2026. For more information visit hauserwirth.com
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