Alchemy and Archetype? Bomarzo and Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden

Rediscovered by the Surrealists and embraced in popular culture, Bomarzo is aguably as important a twentiethand twenty-first-century landscape as a sixteenth-century one. Few places are as revealing of Bomarzo’s meanings and values in recent culture as Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden, built near the small hill town of Capalbio in coastal southern Tuscany between the late 1970s and the artist’s death in 2002. Reportedly conceived in a dream, the Tarot Garden occupies about 14 acres on the side of a hill over the remains of a stone quarry, sometimes described as an Etruscan site. It is filled with the artist’s fanciful sculptures, fabricated on steel armatures coated with concrete and then covered in ceramic, mirror, and glass mosaic. As the name of the garden suggests, its imagery was derived from the 22 cards of the major arcana, one of the five suits of the Tarot, a Renaissance-era card game. What does this striking twentieth-century garden have to do with Bomarzo? Initially, it might seem, very little. Niki de Saint Phalle was born in France in 1930 and raised primarily in the United States. She came to prominence with a group of French assemblage and performance artists known as the Nouveau Realists in Paris in the 1960s. Her particular trademark was firing bullets at canvases encrusted with household implements set in plaster and hung with bags of pigment that spattered on impact, creating what she called ‘shooting paintings’. The first one was made in Paris in 1961, around the time French police killed dozens of protestors during a mass demonstration in support of the Algerian National Liberation Front. But she came to be better known eventually for large, painted plaster or concrete and mosaic figures of big-breasted and ample-bottomed women she called Nanas, who populated both her gallery and museum exhibitions as well as public spaces around the world. Large-scale fantastical assemblages of these figures were always a substantial part of her output as an artist, from the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal to the Stravinsky Fountain outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Figure 1). Several of these installations, including the Stravinsky Fountain, were made in collaboration with her on-again, off-again lover, Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, known for creating enormous kinetic machines, some of which self-destructed in dramatic performances. Saint Phalle’s ambitions for these large environments were in some measure both political and artistic: she wanted to prove, she said, that women could work on a monumental scale just as capably as men. If the Tarot Garden owed its origins to a dream, it was a dream with many waking elements. A chronology on the garden’s official website traces its beginnings to the artist’s 1955 visit to Antoni Gaudí’s early twentieth-century Parc Güell in Barcelona, with its imaginative botanical and zoological imagery in colorful mosaic and stone (Figures 2 and 3). The artist and her friends thereafter became connoisseurs of offbeat environments. In 1961, she and Tinguely — along with the painter Larry Rivers, his wife Clarice, and the poet John Ashbery — visited the late nineteenth-century Palais Idéal of the postman Ferdinand Cheval, a stone and concrete temple to all religions and a hymn to the fecundity of nature at Hauterives in the Drôme region of central France (Figure 4). The next year, the pair found their way to Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, three latticework structures encrusted with shells and broken ceramics that rise from a mosaic garden in Los Angeles (Figure 5). The same year, she became familiar with the Sacro Bosco in Bomarzo, with lasting consequences for her work.