Lot 35 D

The famous ‘Nanas’ have populated Niki de Saint Phalle’s oeuvre since 1965. Prompted by her friend’s pregnancy, the artist creates voluptuous female figures with accentuated feminine curves, at first made from wire frames, fabric and papier maché, and later from painted polyester resin. The Nanas unites diverse female role models into a single figure, as an allegory for woman per se. They celebrate their femininity in an uninhibited and self-confident manner – thus representing the antithesis of the conservative, orderly image of women as modeled by Niki de Saint Phalle’s family and against which she has rebelled since early adolescence. “Everything had to be hidden for you. I wanted to show. I wanted to show everything. My heart, my feelings. Green. Red. Yellow. Blue. Violet. Hate, love, laughter, fear, tenderness”, wrote Saint Phalle in a fictitious letter to her mother (quoted in: Niki de Saint Phalle, exhib.cat. Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle Bonn 1992, p.186). ‘Fontaine aux quatre Nana’ is a fantastic fountain object in which four individually designed "Nanas" take a bath together in a relaxed state of joie de vivre. Jets of water spray out of their hands, mouths and colourfully patterned breasts through fine nozzles. Time and again, Saint Phalle correlates the "Nanas" to the sensually perceptible element of water. Her first "Nana"-fountain was made in 1967 for her retrospective in Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and she also designed a fountain feature very similar to the ‘Fontaine aux quatre Nana’ for her famous ‘Tarot Garden’ in Tuscany, which she executed as her life’s work from 1979 onwards.