The more you know about either Niki de Saint Phalle’s or Yayoi Kusama’s upbringing, the more amazing it is that they both not only survived but went on to thrive, producing along the way large bodies of such positive and joyful work.
They were born just one year apart - Kusama in 1929 in Japan and Saint Phalle in 1930 in France - and would rise above their difficult and traumatic childhoods at least in part by using art as a form of therapy. Each of them has gone on to make work that is exhibited worldwide, instantly recognisable and, as the new exhibition at Opera Gallery in London [link] examines, replete with childhood.
Both artists have been quite frank about the abuse that they suffered. Kusama voluntarily lives in a mental hospital in Tokyo and has described how her mother was both physically and mentally abusive, among other things ordering the young girl to spy on her philandering father’s affairs. Saint Phalle was sexually abused by her own father and described her early years as “hell”, indeed her two younger siblings would go on to commit suicide.
Kusama and Saint Phalle would each, however, achieve remarkable levels both of success and respect - there is a lovely story from 1961 about Saint Phalle and a happening at the American Embassy in Paris where she is joined by luminaries including her to-be husband Jean Tinguely, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage. Kusama for her part is reckoned by some to be the world's most successful living artist.
The exhibition at Opera Gallery’s London space brings together works by these two artists who have so much in common. And what the forty-one pieces demonstrate is that the two artists - in their separate ways - used their art to a great extent in an attempt to make things better.
Saint Phalle’s desire - or need - to exorcise the traumas of her childhood included the performative and destructive aggression of her early 1960s “Tirs” or “Shootings”, which involved active gunplay against symbolic objects, but went on to mature into what Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker called simply a “feminist celebration of womanhood”, her instantly recognizable “Nanas”, those colourful, curvaceous, larger-than-life, and often dancing female figures.
"I wanted to invent a new mother, a mother goddess, and be reborn within its form” - Saint Phalle
It is perhaps also no surprise that Kusama is best known for her infinite dots, nets, and mirrors, providing as they do the prospect of protective immersion and escape.
“I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live” - Kusama
The exhibition is titled after one of Jung’s enduring concepts - this year is the 150th anniversary of his birth - that of the “inner child” refering to the lingering effect of a person’s early experiences. There can be few artists whose childhood was dragged into their art more than Saint Phalle and Kusama.
Art as therapy, escape, psychosis even, is trope that runs to cliché, however it is unusual to see it so evidently applicable whilst being so invisible to the eye - a testament to the power of the will, the fortitude, and the abilities of the pair.
To read the early biographies of the two artists is to enter a world of pain and fear, while to see their art is to be cuddled, drawn into a safe place, a place of wonder - both Kusama and Saint Phalle remind us that art has the power to heal, transform, and inspire.
"Niki de Saint Phalle & Yayoi Kusama: Inner Child" is at Opera Gallery, London from April 3 to May 5 link
on May 17, Saint Phalle and and Tinguely also feature in the exhibition "Myths & Machines" @ Hauser & Wirth Somerset link
top: Niki de Saint Phalle at the Stedelijk Museum, 1967 © Jac. de Nijs / Nationaal Archief, CCO / Anefo & Yayoi Kusama in 2015 © Yayoi Kusama
