Niki de Saint Phalle

Biography

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 American 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 lesser-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".

== Early life and education (1930–1948) == Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle was born on 29 October 1930, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris. Her father was Count André-Marie de Saint Phalle (1906–1967), a French banker, and her mother was an American, Jeanne Jacqueline Harper (1908–1980). Marie-Agnès was the second of five children, and her cousins included the French novelist Thérèse de Saint Phalle (Baroness Jehan de Drouas), her double cousin, daughter of Count Alexandre de Saint Phalle (brother of Count André-Marie) and his wife Helene Georgia Harper (sister of Jeanne Jacqueline). Another cousin was the American-born investment banker, lawyer, and former Office of Strategic Services agent Thibaut de Saint Phalle, who served in the Carter administration as a director of the Export–Import Bank of the United States (1977-1981). Marie-Agnès was born one year after Black Tuesday, and the French economy was also suffering in the aftermath of the infamous stock market crash that initiated the Great Depression. Within months of her birth, her father's finance company closed, and her parents moved with her oldest brother to the suburbs of New York City; she was left with her maternal grandparents in Nièvre, near the geographical center of France. Around 1933, she rejoined her parents in Greenwich, Connecticut; her father had found work as manager of the American branch of the Saint Phalle family's bank. In 1937, the family moved to East 88th Street and Park Avenue in the affluent Upper East Side neighborhood of New York City. By this time, Marie-Agnès was known as "Niki", the name she would use from then on. Niki grew up in a strict Catholic environment, against which she repeatedly rebelled. Her mother was temperamental and violent, beating the younger children, and forcing them to eat even if they were not hungry. Both of her younger siblings, Elizabeth and Richard de Saint Phalle, would later commit suicide as adults. The atmosphere at home was tense; the only place where Niki felt comfortable and warm was in the kitchen, overseen by a black cook. Decades later, Niki would reveal that she had suffered years of sexual abuse from her father, starting at the age of 11. She would later refer to the environment where she grew up as enfer ("hell"). She spent most of her childhood and adolescence in New York City, and summers in Connecticut or on Long Island. She frequently returned to France to visit relatives, becoming fluent in both French and American English. In 1937, she attended school at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on East 91st Street in Manhattan. After she was expelled in 1941, she rejoined her maternal grandparents, who had moved to Princeton, New Jersey, and briefly attended the public school there. She returned to the Upper East Side and studied there at the Brearley School from 1942 to 1944. There, she met Jackie Matisse, granddaughter of artist Henri Matisse; they would become lifelong friends. However, Saint Phalle was dismissed for painting in red the fig leaves on the school's classical statuary. Despite this, she would later say it was there "[that] I became a feminist. They inculcated in us that women can and must accomplish great things." She was then enrolled in a convent school in Suffern, New York, but was expelled. She finally graduated from the Oldfields School in Glencoe, Maryland in 1947. During her late teenage years, Saint Phalle became a fashion model; at the age of 18, she appeared on the cover of Life (26 September 1949) and, three years later, on the November 1952 cover of French Vogue. She also appeared in the pages of Elle and Harper's Bazaar. "At one point, Gloria Steinem spotted Saint Phalle walking down Fifty-seventh Street, purseless and in a cowboy getup. In an interview quoted by the show’s curator, Ruba Katrib, in the catalogue, Steinem recalled thinking, 'That is the first free woman I have ever seen in real life. I want to be just like her.'"

== First marriage and children (1949–1960) ==

At the age of 18, Saint Phalle married Harry Mathews, whom she had first met at the age of 11 (he was 12) through her father. Six years later, they again encountered each other by chance on a train to Princeton, and soon became a couple. Initially, they had a civil ceremony on 6 June 1949 in New York City Hall. At the urging of Niki's mother, they also had a religious rite at the French Church of New York the following February, when their nuptials were mentioned in a US Vogue fashion spread featuring her. Although her parents accepted the union, her husband's family objected to her Catholic background and cut them off financially, causing them to resort to occasional shoplifting. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts so Mathews could study music at Harvard University. Saint Phalle began to paint in oils and gouaches but aimed to pursue a career in acting. Their first child, Laura, was born in April 1951. In 1952, the small family moved to Paris, where Harry continued his studies in conducting at I’Ecole Normale de Musique. The new parents were casual, even negligent in their care, but their children would benefit from better financial circumstances after Mathews received an inheritance. Saint Phalle rejected the staid, conservative values of her family, which dictated domestic positions for wives and particular strict rules of conduct. Poet John Ashbery recalled that Saint Phalle's artistic pursuits were rejected in turn by relatives: her uncle "French banker Count Alexandre de Saint-Phalle, ... reportedly takes a dim view of her artistic activities", Ashbery observed. However, after marrying young and becoming a mother, she found herself living the same bourgeois lifestyle that she had attempted to escape. For about a decade, the family would wander around France and Europe, living a bohemian lifestyle. In Nice, Saint Phalle and Mathews would have separate affairs in 1953; after she attacked her husband's mistress, she took an overdose of sleeping pills, but they had little effect because she was manic at the time. When Harry discovered a stash of knives, razors, and scissors under a mattress, he took his wife to a mental clinic in Nice, where she was treated with electroshock therapy and insulin shock therapy. Liberated from routine household work, she focused on creating artwork instead and improved enough to be discharged in six weeks. Around the same time, her husband abandoned his music studies and started to write his first novel, eventually switching to a career in writing. While in Paris on a modeling assignment in 1954, Saint Phalle was introduced to the American-French painter Hugh Weiss, who became both her friend and artistic mentor. He encouraged her to continue painting in her self-taught style. In September 1954, the small family moved to Deià, Mallorca, Spain, where her son Philip was born in May 1955. While in Spain, Saint Phalle read the works of Proust and visited Madrid and Barcelona, where she became deeply affected by the work of architect Antoni Gaudí. Gaudí's influence opened many previously unimagined possibilities for Saint Phalle, especially the use of unusual materials and objets-trouvés as structural elements in sculpture and architecture. Saint Phalle was particularly struck by Gaudí's "Park Güell" which would inspire her one day to create her own garden-based artwork that would combine artistic and natural elements. Saint Phalle continued to paint, particularly after she and her family moved to Paris in the mid-1950s. Her first art exhibition was held in 1956 in Switzerland, where she displayed her naïve style of oil painting. In 1956, she met the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely and his wife, artist Eva Aeppli. Saint Phalle attempted her first large-scale sculpture, enlisting Tinguely to make an iron armature, which she covered with plaster and paint. In the late 1950s, Saint Phalle became ill with hyperthyroidism and tachycardia, which were eventually treated by an operation in 1958. In 1959, Saint Phalle first encountered multiple artworks by Yves Klein, Marcel Duchamp, Daniel Spoerri, Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Seeing these avant-garde works triggered her "first great artistic crisis". She switched from oil painting to gouaches and gloss paint, and began to produce assemblages from household objects and castoffs. By this time, she had decided to dedicate herself fully to creating art, free from the obligations of everyday family life. In 1960, she and Harry separated by mutual agreement, and her husband moved to another apartment with their two children. At that time, her daughter Laura was nine, and her son Philip was five years old. Mathews would occasionally buy artworks from his wife as a way of providing her modest support, and she would visit him and the children periodically. She soon moved in with Jean Tinguely, who by then had separated from his own wife, Eva Aeppli. He was becoming well known for his kinetic sculptures made from cast-off mechanisms and junk. In many ways, the pair were opposites, and sometimes had violent disagreements, and frequent affairs with others. They would live together intermittently and collaborate closely on artistic projects for over a decade before marrying in 1971. Two years later, they separated, but remained on good terms and continued to collaborate on various projects up through Tinguely's death in 1991. In 1960, Tinguely introduced her to Pontus Hultén, then the director of the Moderna Museet (Modern Museum) in Stockholm, Sweden. Over the next few years, he would invite her to participate in important exhibitions and acquire her artworks for the museum. He would later become the first director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1974–1981), where he continued to be influential in promoting wider recognition of Saint Phalle's artwork.

== Tirs (1961–1963) ==

Saint Phalle created a series of works in the early 1960s, she called Tirs ("Shootings" or "Shots"). The series began as "target pictures", with painted bullseye targets prominently displayed within her painted collages, such as Saint Sébastien (Portrait of My Lover / Portrait of My Beloved / Martyr nécessaire) (1961), or Assemblage (Figure with Dartboard Head) (1962). She would invite viewers to throw darts at the dartboards embedded as faces in her figurative assemblages, which were influenced by the targets painted by her friend Jasper Johns. Soon, she would start by embedding knives, razor blades, scissors, eggbeaters, baby-doll arms, and other household items in plaster covering a large board, along with bags filled with colorful paints, cans of spray paint, and sometimes tomato. Also, she might suspend bags of paint or cans of spray paint in front of the white-painted assemblage. She would then repeatedly shoot the assemblage with a pistol, rifle, or miniature cannon, causing the liquids to "bleed" or to spray out. Her first staged public shooting event was in February 1961, attended by Jean Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, and Pierre Restany, among others. Her early art performance/events took place in the "Impasse Ronsin", a trash-strewn back alley in the Montparnasse district of Paris. This cul-de-sac was also the site of the improvised studios of Constantin Brâncuși, Jean Tinguely, Yves Klein, Max Ernst, Les Lalanne, and other experimental artists in the 1950s and 1960s. As founder of the Nouveau réalisme ("New Realist") movement, Restany asked Saint Phalle to join this group of French artists upon seeing her performance; she would become the only female member of this group. The extreme expressions of violence attracted media attention, catapulting Saint Phalle into the ranks of avant-garde artistic rebellion. The Tirs combined performance, body art, sculpture, and painting, in the artistic ferment of the 1960s. Saint Phalle began to present variations on this process in art museums and galleries, and recruited other artists to join in staged public "happenings", where some of her colleagues would also pull the trigger. At American performances, she would meet many other emerging artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, and Ed Kienholz. She also organized indoors events at art galleries, where she would invite visitors to shoot at her assemblages. Saint Phalle participated in Spoerri's "Edition MAT" (Multiplication d’Art Transformable) program of multiple artwork editions, supplying simpler versions of her Tirs works, with detailed instructions on how to shoot them with a .22 rifle. Saint Phalle carefully documented her artistic process in the Tirs with writing, still photos, and films. She would attach common readymade artifacts to a board, attach bags of colorful paint, whitewash everything, and then dip the assemblage into milk-white plaster. Once it had dried, the collection was ready for shooting by a purchaser. In June 1961, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely joined Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in a concert-happening called Variations II, orchestrated by avant-garde American composer John Cage, and held at the American Embassy in Paris. While David Tudor played Cage compositions on the piano, the artists created their works of art on stage as the audience watched the proceedings. In August 1961, Marcel Duchamp introduced Saint Phalle and Tinguely to Salvador Dalí, who invited them to create a life-sized exploding bull with fireworks (Toro de Fuego). This Homenage a Dalí ("Homage to Dalí") was wheeled out after the end of a traditional Spanish bullfight, in Figueras, Catalonia, Spain, and exploded in front of the audience. In 1962, she had her first one-woman show in New York City, at the gallery run by Alexander Iolas. It included Homage to Le Facteur Cheval, a shooting gallery where visitors could fire on one of her Tirs installations. This began her long working relationship with the gallerist, eventually comprising at least 17 exhibitions of her work. An exclusive 1962 open-air shooting event in the Malibu Hills above Los Angeles was attended by Hollywood celebrities, including Jane Fonda and John Houseman. Attendees from the art world included John Cage, Ed Ruscha, and Leo Castelli, while Ed Kienholz helped to manage the firearms. In most of these public performances, Saint Phalle was impeccably dressed in a fashionable white pantsuit. By 1963, she had taken the series to galleries in New York City and Los Angeles, inviting the public to participate in the shootings. In Los Angeles, she shot a large-scale King Kong assemblage she had constructed, paint-splattering the embedded sculpted faces of politicians such as John F Kennedy, Fidel Castro, and Charles De Gaulle, with Santa Claus and Donald Duck as well. This work would later be acquired by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and would mark her transition to a new series of fantastic monsters, animals, and female figures. Throughout her career, snakes, birds, and dragons would become recurring symbols in her artworks. While in New York City, Saint Phalle and Tinguely stayed in the Hotel Chelsea in 1962, and again in 1964-1965. In 1963, the couple purchased an old hotel, called Auberge au Cheval Blanc ("White Horse Inn"), in Soisy-sur-Ecole, 44 kilometres (27 mi) southeast of Paris. It had previously been a hotel, a café, a cinema, and even a brothel, but the new owners converted it into artistic studios which they would share over the decades to come.

== Nanas (1964–1973) ==

Saint Phalle next explored the various roles of women, in what would develop into her best-known and most prolific series of sculptures. She started making life-size dolls of women, such as brides and mothers giving birth, monsters, and large heads. Initially, they were made of soft materials, such as wool, cloth, and papier-mâché, but they soon evolved into plaster over a wire framework and plastic toys, some painted all white. As the series developed into larger monumental works, Saint Phalle used composite fiberglass-reinforced polyester plastic (also known as FRP or GRP) decorated with multiple bright-colored acrylic or polyester paints. She also used polyurethane foam in many of her early sculptures. These innovative materials enabled the construction of colorful, large-scale sculptures with new ease and fluidity of form. Saint Phalle unknowingly used dangerous fabrication and painting processes that released airborne glass fibers and chemicals, including styrene, epoxy, and toxic solvents. In 1963–64, she created a series of sculptures protesting stereotypical societal roles for women, as child bearers, devouring mothers, witches, and prostitutes. Some of her early artworks from this Bride period depicted ghostly, skeletal brides dressed in white, which have been compared to Miss Havisham, an ethereal character in Charles Dickens' novel Great Expectations. Over time, these figures became more joyful, whimsical, colorful, and larger in scale. Inspired by a collaborative drawing with American artist Larry Rivers of his wife, her pregnant friend Clarice Price Rivers (1936–2024), Saint Phalle began to portray archetypal female figures with a more optimistic view of the position of women in society. Gwendoline (1965) was the first major sculpture in what would become a lifetime series of these works. The newer figures took on ecstatic dance poses and even acrobatic positions, such as handstands and cartwheels. Saint Phalle's light-hearted figures have been compared to the joyful dancers of Matisse and the sturdy female figures by Gaston Lachaise, Aristide Maillol, and Rodin. By 1965, she was calling her artistic expressions of the proverbial everywoman Nanas, after a French slang word that is roughly equivalent to "broad", or "chick". The term also recalls the childish French taunt nananère. The first of these freely posed forms, made of papier-mâché, yarn, and cloth, was exhibited at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in Paris in September 1965. During this show, she joined a type of tombola raffle organized by the Artist's Club of New York, whereby artworks were randomly left in coin-operated luggage lockers at Pennsylvania Station, and keys were offered for $10 each. For this show, Iolas also published Saint Phalle's first artist book that included her handwritten text in combination with her drawings of Bananas. Encouraged by Iolas, she started a highly productive output of graphics work that accompanied her exhibitions, which included silk-screened prints, posters, books, and writings. In the years to come, she would publish multiple hand-lettered books, profusely illustrated with colorful drawings and diagrams, on topics such as AIDS prevention and various periods in her life story. In 1966, Saint Phalle collaborated with Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt on a temporary indoor sculpture installation, Hon – en katedral (which means "She-a-Cathedral" in Swedish), filling a large temporary gallery in the Moderna Museet, in Stockholm, Sweden. During construction, Saint Phalle recruited Swiss art student Rico Weber, who had been working as a dishwasher in the museum restaurant (in the following years, he would become a vital assistant and collaborator for both Saint Phalle and Tinguely). A team of 8 people worked strenuously for 40 days, first building a frame using metal rebar, covering it with chicken wire, sheathing it with fabric attached with smelly animal glue, and then painting the inside of the enclosure black, and painting the outside in bright colors. The final structure was 82 feet (25 m) long and 30 feet (9.1 m) wide, weighing around 6 tonnes (6,000 kg). In the tabloid-sized newsprint catalog published for the show, Saint Phalle included a diagram showing the artistic influences on her design, which included Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, Ferdinand Cheval's Le Palais Idéal, and the architecture of Antoni Gaudi. The outer form was a giant, reclining sculpture of a pregnant woman (a Nana), whose voluminous interior could be entered through a door-sized vaginal opening between her legs. Written on one of Hon's massive thighs was the motto Honi soit qui mal y pense ("May he be shamed who thinks badly of it"). Inside the massive sculpture were a 12-seat cinema theater, a milk bar inside a breast, a fish pond, and a brain built by Tinguely, with moving mechanical parts. In addition, the sprawling Nana contained a coin telephone, a love-seat sofa, a museum of fake paintings, a sandwich vending machine, an art installation by Ultvedt, and a playground slide for children. After an initial shocked silence, the installation elicited extensive public commentary in magazines and newspapers throughout the world, raising awareness of the Moderna Museet. Over 100,000 visitors crowded in to experience the immersive environment, including many children. At the end of 3 months, the entire temporary setup was demolished and removed, except for the head, which was preserved by the museum in its permanent collection. Some small fragments were attached to limited-edition exhibition catalogs and sold as mementos. Around this time, Saint Phalle also designed stage sets and costumes for theatrical productions: Éloge de La Folie ("Praise of the Madness", 1966), a ballet by Roland Petit; an adaptation of the Aristophanes play Lysistrata (1966); and a German-language play she co-wrote with Rainer von Diez titled ICH (All About Me) (1968). Large fixed or moveable Nana figures were prominent in several of these productions. In 1967, Saint Phalle began working with polyester resin, a material which could be shaped easily but would transform into a hard, smooth, weather-resistant surface. This new technology enabled her to construct large, fantastical figures for display outdoors in public spaces and parks. The material is reasonably durable outdoors (similar materials are used for boats and car bodies), although decades of weather exposure can eventually cause deterioration, requiring specialized art conservation measures. In August 1967, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam opened Saint Phalle's first retrospective exhibition, Les Nanas au pouvoir ("Nana Power"). For the show, Niki created her first "Nana Dream House" and "Nana Fountain", and also showed plans for her first "Nana Town". In 1967, she exhibited Le Paradis Fantastique ("The Fantastic Paradise"), a collaborative grouping of nine of her sculptures with six machines built by Tinguely, on the rooftop terrace of the 8-level French Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. The composition was originally conceived of as an attack by Tinguely's dark mechanical constructions upon Saint Phalle's brightly colored animals and female figures, a kind of "amorous warfare". Although the French Pavilion itself was popular, most visitors did not see the rooftop terrace where the sculptures were installed. In 1968, the sculptures were re-displayed at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, and then for a year in New York City's Central Park. In 1971, some of the artworks were purchased by the Moderna Museet, and permanently installed nearby in an outdoor sculpture garden on Skeppsholmen, an island in central Stockholm. In 1968, she first disclosed that she had developed respiratory problems from exposure to dust and fumes in making her artwork. Starting in 1968, Saint Phalle sold Nana inflatable pool toys, which appeared in the April 15, 1968, issue of Vogue magazine. She ignored complaints from art critics, focusing on raising money for her future monumental projects. In the coming years, she would face more criticism for over-commercializing and popularizing her artwork, but she raised significant funding that enabled her to finance several ambitious projects on her own. Her production of smaller, lower-cost objects also placed her art within reach of more supporters of her causes. During her career, she produced clothing, jewelry, perfume, glass or porcelain figures, furniture, and craft items, many with a Nana theme. From 1969 to 1971, she worked on her first full-scale architecture project, three small sculptural houses commissioned by Rainer von Diez in southern France, which she called Le Rêve de l'oiseau ("The Dream of the Bird"). The project was a collaboration with him and Jean Tinguely, and a forerunner of her later Tarot Garden project. In 1969, she joined several other artists under the lead of Tinguely, starting work on Le Cyclop ("Cyclops", also known as La Tête, "The Head", or le Monstre dans la forêt, "the Monster in the forest"), in Milly-la-Forêt, near Paris. Collaborators included Daniel Spoerri, Bernhard Luginbuhl, and Eva Aeppli. Eventually, 15 different people worked on the project, which would not be considered finished until 1994. In 1969, in an interview on television in her studio, she shared her views about the place of women in politics and said, "I think women could administer this world much better. If Black power and women power would get together, they would take over everything. That's the solution. A new world of joy." In November 1970, as part of an artists' reunion celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Nouveaux Réalistes, Saint Phalle shot at an altar assemblage. On 13 July 1971, Saint Phalle and Tinguely legally married, perhaps for tax savings, as Saint Phalle thus became a Swiss citizen. Their marriage did give the two artists mutual control over each other's artistic estate if one of them should die. That same year, she designed her first pieces of jewelry. In 1972, she installed Golem (Niki de Saint Phalle), commissioned by the then mayor Teddy Kollek, at a children's playground in the Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood of Jerusalem. It is a giant monster with three red tongues protruding from its mouth, which serve as playground slides. This project was the first time she used the shotcrete method of spraying concrete over a metal framework to produce large structures; this method would be used in her further major projects. Starting in 1972, she engaged Robert Haligon ("Fabricant de Plastiques d’Art") to help fabricate her large-scale sculptures, as well as various editions of artworks. This collaboration would continue for 25 years, including all four of his children, notably Gérard, who would take the lead in later years. The collaboration would produce approximately 3,000 sculptures, ranging from monumental outdoors pieces to small multiple editions. Saint Phalle personally trained daughter Marie Haligon to paint her multiple edition sculptures, following a master artist's prototype. Initially, the artist preferred a matte paint finish, shunning shiny surfaces. However, she was forced to adopt glossy surface finishes to attain improved durability of the paints on her outdoors sculptures. Over time, she embraced this glossy visual effect, and began using mirrors and polished stones to surface her artworks. In 1972, Saint Phalle shot footage for her surreal horror film Daddy, about a deeply troubled father-daughter love-hate relationship. The filming was done in a rented castle near Grasse in southeastern France in association with filmmaker Peter Whitehead. In November, the film was shown in London. The following January, she produced a new version of the film, with additional scenes in Soisy and New York, and an expanded cast. The revised version premiered at Lincoln Center for the 11th New York Film Festival in April. She was also commissioned to design the cover of the program for the festival. In 1973, Saint Phalle worked with Tinguely and Rico Weber on a commission from Roger and Fabienne Nellens to build a playhouse in the garden of their home in seaside Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium. The Le Dragon they built was a substantial structure, 21 feet (6.4 m) high and 110 feet (34 m) long, made using techniques derived from the earlier Le Rêve de l'oiseau and Golem projects. The fantastical building would eventually include a kitchen, bathroom, toilet, heating system, and bedroom, at an estimated cost of $30,000 to $40,000. The exterior was decorated with bright paintings, including ones done by Roger Nellens and the Formula 1 race-car driver Jacky Ickx. Similar to the Golem project the previous year, a long tongue formed an exterior slide from the upper level. In 1987, graffiti artist Keith Haring would live in Le Dragon while working on a mural commissioned by Roger Nellens at nearby Knokke Casino, and would return for at least three summers. With Saint Phalle's enthusiastic consent, he would paint a long fresco along an interior stairway wall. Eventually, the building would be designated a Monument Historique of Belgium, though it would remain private property. Saint Phalle continued to create Nanas for the rest of her life, but would soon focus her attention on a comprehensive project in Italy.