“The heroine of her own fairy tale, she slays her own dragons, domesticating dangerous monsters into playful companions.” So the art historian and critic Barbara Rose wrote of Niki de Saint Phalle in the December 1987 issue of Vogue.

Saint Phalle herself happened to share that point of view. As she once put it in a letter : “Very early I decided to become a hero. Who would I be? George Sand? Joan of Arc? Napoleon in petticoats?”

One of the most dazzling figures in contemporary art, the French-American artist was one half of a dynamic creative collaboration (and, for 20 years, an actual marriage) with Jean Tinguely, the seminal Swiss sculptor and master of machines, that lasted from the 1950s until his death in 1991. “Niki de Saint Phalle & Jean Tinguely: Myths & Machines,” a new e

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