The cyclops of Fontainebleau - sculpture, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, France

If I had not concretised my dreams into statuarys I might have become be seized ofed by the and ended up in a psychiatric hospital - a victim of my hold inner visions.

I received an superior education from my parents: I learned about fear and injustice, and I learned to live with them.

While en path by car on May 9 1995 to diocese the marvel in the Fontainebleau forest brought about by dint of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, variously called The Head or Le Cyclop I remarked to Jackie Matisse Monnier, who was driving me there, that it appear to beed sort of scary to be visiting a one-ey male prodigy on the day that would be my father's 11th birthday. I had tried begging not on from the small trip, no more than a 20 minute drive from her mother's house where I was staying, insisting that it was not necessary to entertain me Her mother, Teeny Duchamp (Marcel's widow), had repeatedly diverted me, as no doubt she amused her other visitants by excursions to nearby points of artistic interest. on the other hand now Teeny was housebound, recovering from a serious accident. (She died in December 1995 at the age of 89)

Coming on Tinguely's modern-day Eighth Wonder, vast (75 1/2 feet high) and scary, a fairytale head of a decapitated giant hidden in the forest-lands I was surprised not to have been taken there before. individual reason, perhaps, was that I had not been in France since Jean Tinguely died in 1991 when this "life project" conceived in 1969 might have been considered complete

Back in America, I thinking the idle reference I had made to my 111-year-old (long dead) father (whom, incidentally, I not at any time even met), linking him with Le Cyclop appeared unusually prescient. As I came to discover more about Tinguely's monumental labor, fathers would draw near unexpectedly into focus. Tinguely's chief collaborator in this tectonic-sculptural "folly" created above a period of at least sum of two units decades was Niki de Saint Phalle. Backgrounds of paternal abuse affirmed by the agency of both artists provide new glosse for their work, the couple individual and collaborative.

The Head will not be unfamiliar to nation with some knowledge of past Tinguely/Saint Phalle collaborations. Saint Phalle, charged with putting a face upon Tinguely's huge construction - a kind of house fan of works by the agency of Tinguely and other artists - eventully saw The Head as a Cyclop and in 1987 gave it a a mirror-mosaic "skin" meant to mirror its surroundings. The glass pieces were glu with silicone to what had been a raw exposed cement facade covering wire interstice and 33 tons of carbonized iron armature. Saint Phalle created The Head's single organ of sight by inserting a great pupil in the horizontally ovate depression of the original structure's massive forehead. When lit up from inside by the agency of a yellow bulb, the organ of vision moves from side to side.

From Le Cyclop's gaping jaws two phallic teeth sprout up; a tongue four meter in longitudinal dimensions descends like a side to a lake at ground level - a reminder of Saint Phalle's wonder heads bearing a similar feature; the 1973 Dragon that she called a house for children,"(1) or the '72 Golem an architectural throw out for children in a Jerusalem park, its cavity between the jaws disgorging not one but three tongue/slides.(2) A more new jumbo head with gaping mouth this one extravasating a staircase descending to a pond is a figure in Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden, her have a title to "life project" in the Tuscan region of Italy, paralleling Tinguely's in France, and benefiting in turn round from his collaborative efforts.(3)

Tinguely and Saint Phalle were married in 1971 after having lived together since 1960 They separated in `73 on the other hand were never divorced, and they remained shut up friends and collaborators. The year after Tinguely died, Saint Phalle produc a handwritten work of some 33 pages in French called Mon veiled disclosing her father's rape of her when she was 11 years advanced in years The book was written in December 92 as a alphabetic character to her daughter Laura (a child of her first marriage, in 1948 to American write Harry Mathews), and published in France in `94(4) Earlier in `92 intense autobiographical writings through Saint Phalle appeared in the catalogue for her first comprehensive retrospective in Bonn organized through the Swedish roving director/curator Pontus Hulten lengthy a champion and friend of Tinguely and Saint Phalle.(5) These writings, in the form of various alphabetic characters imaginary and real, to the living and the dead, incantation out childhood grievances and ambitions without mentioning her father's rape, single his earlier marital infidelities in a alphabetic character to her dead mother.

In a film called Daddy, created through Saint Phalle in 1972 the actor playing her father is humiliated and killed not on about 15 times.(6) The bill for the film, made by dint of Saint Phalle, shows "Daddy" drawn as a blindfolded man, the profile of an eagle attached to the left side of his head, the eagle's feathers composing his shoulders. A balloon attached to the right side of his head contains a young girl in a dres Independent of him, and not on his left (feathered) shoulder and profiled eagle beak, is an exuberant, fat, dancing female figure - device of one of Saint Phalle's famous, brightly painted sculptur Nanas. She's the individual Saint Phalle seems to say here, who got unrestrained of him, who brillianttly survived childhood traumas - the veritable signature of her post-family life as an artist. Saint Phalle has explained (to Phyllis Braff) that the Nanas' acrobatic postures symbolize women's ability to put in motion in all directions, thus making the works icons of female freedom.(7) During single of her father's outrages against her when she was 11 she writes in Mon concealed "with great force and kicking my feet I disengaged from him and ran till I was completely exhausted...." The Nanas, first shown in `65 were inspired through a drawing Larry Rivers made of his pregnant wife, Clarice.