A golden-winged, five-meter-tall Angel of Temperance by Niki de Saint Phalle hangs above the grand glass entranceway of Quebec City’s Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ). It makes sense: the French American artist is best known in North America for these voluptuous feminine sculptures—her Nanas. But beyond the lobby, visitors to “Niki de Saint Phalle The 1980s and 1990s: Art Unleashed” will discover that those famous ladies may be larger than life but are just a small part of her legacy.
The exhibition focuses on the final two decades of the late artist’s career, when she was obsessed with creating a monumental sculpture garden in Italy based on the tarot deck and embraced creative (and commercial) ways to make that dream a reality.
The show, produced in collaboration with Les Abattoirs, Musée-Frac Occitanie Toulouse, has more than 150 objects on display, from fantastical monumental sculptures covered in glittering mosaics to small household objects such as vases and perfume bottles—each bearing Niki de Saint Phalle’s distinctive bright colors and sensuous curves.
Niki de Saint Phalle was born in 1930 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. She spent her youth in New York, where she worked as a model, appearing on the covers of Life and Vogue magazines. After returning to Europe in her twenties, the self-taught artist joined the nouveau réalisme art movement—the only woman in the group, which also included her future second husband and collaborator, Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely. Her angry “shooting series” Tir (in which she fired a rifle at collages filled with paint) attracted the attention of admirers like Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dalí and John Cage. The joyful Nana sculptures soon followed: large women, all breasts and buttocks, in ecstatic acrobatic poses.
The MNBAQ exhibition begins in 1978: the year de Saint Phalle started plotting her Tarot Garden. Inspired by Gaudí’s Park Güell in Barcelona, she envisioned a village-in-a-garden, filled with massive sculptures representing the Major Arcana of the tarot deck. She would dedicate herself to this work for twenty years, living for a time inside one of the sculptures.
On display here are architectural drawings and an original maquette for The Empress—a woman presented as a Sphinx, with exaggerated conical breasts. Just opposite the maquette in a glass case is a small but essential object in Niki de Saint Phalle’s ‘80s oeuvre: a square perfume bottle of cobalt blue glass, topped with two intertwined snakes.
Launched in 1982 with a party in New York sponsored by Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, the Niki de Saint Phalle perfume was her way of raising money for the Tarot Garden. She had licensed her art for merchandise as early as 1968 (inflatable Nanas, which you can still purchase in the MNBAQ gift shop). But the Tarot Garden needed big money, and after finding that the golden age of art patronage had passed, the artist threw herself into entrepreneurial mode. It was a good “side” hustle. The perfume ended up financing one-third of the project.
The Living with Art room showcases her mass-produced furniture from the ‘80s, examples of which include chairs, tables, lamps and mirrors. A selection of vases, tiny versions of her Nanas, could be seen as a commentary on the convergence of sexuality and domesticity. What they really represented was her financial freedom, of becoming her own self-contained industry.
The exhibition takes a turn after that. Against dark blue walls are drawings for her 1986 illustrated handbook, AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands. The artist was one of the earliest supporters of AIDS charities, and 70,000 copies of the book were distributed free in schools.
Nearby is The Wall of Rage, a numbered list of awful things that inspired her 1960s shooting paintings. It feels like a backward step, out of place. So does a video installation of her 1973 short film Daddy, with its nod to the cruelties inflicted on her as a child by her father.
The final section, “American Years,” turns to the 1990s, when Niki de Saint Phalle moved back to the United States. In California, she found inspiration in “Black Heroes” including Michael Jordan, Louis Armstrong and Josephine Baker. Once again, we are back in the land of shimmering mosaic sculptures and colorful figures in flight.
At the end of the exhibition is Skull II. A kinetic piece created with Tinguely—a painted polyester sculpture covered in refracting mirrors—offers a moving punctuation. Niki de Saint Phalle died of respiratory failure in 2002 at the age of 72, likely due to long-term damage caused by working with the resins that made her famous. Thanks to her maverick entrepreneurial and marketing initiatives, she was able to leave behind the completed Tarot Garden and a legacy of bold, joyful rebellion.
Niki de Saint Phalle’s “The 1980s and 1990s: Art Unleashed” runs at Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec through January 4, 2026.
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