Niki De Saint PhalleBonjour Max Ernst - Good Morning Max Ernst. 1976

Provenance: US private collection.

Beautiful impression with excellent colours. On heavy semi-stiff Arches paper. Drawn and printed to the full sheet size. Sheet: 500 x 650mm.

Catharina de Saint Phalle, known for almost all her life as ‘Niki’, was one of the first influential feminist artists of her generation. Born just outside Paris into a wealthy banking family who were deeply affected by the 1930s  and were forced to move to New York she was a ‘free spirit’ from a very early age. She worked as a successful model in her 20’s and through her modelling she met the American-French painter Hugh Weiss who became her long-time mentor. After a period living in Majorca she discovered the work of Gaudi. Inspired by his free self-inspired approach to architecture she decided to develop her painting and sculpture, which had been just a hobby, into the focus of her life.

She joined the New Realism Group based in southern France at the end of the 1950s and through contact with Klein, Duchamp, Arman and notably Jean Tinguely (who later in 1971 became her second husband) she decided to abandon painting and focus on ‘assemblages-installations’ of household objects and free form figures  working with gloss paint and plaster. It was from these beginnings that she started to make the now famous female figures – the ‘Nanas’.   These figures and their 'world' also appear in her drawing and paintings.

The title of this work is from her book, with her illustrations, written in homage to Max Ernst and his work from the Dada period.   As is this image it is a type of 'compendium' of her imagery.