At Pucci, Artist Niki de Saint Phalle Is a Muse for the Ages

It was a delight, if not a surprise, to spy the work of Niki de Saint Phalle on **Peter Dundas’**s fall mood board. The pairing makes perfect sense: Not only was the artist the subject of a just-closed exhibition in Paris, but her exuberant work falls right in line with the Italian house’s famous prints, and its love of pattern and color.

An iconoclast, Saint Phalle was born in France, and raised in New York, where the self-taught artist was expelled from the Brearley School for painting bright red fig leaves on the school statues. A beauty, she modeled as a teenager, one of her few concessions to conventional female roles. Saint Phalle, who did a series of “rifle shot” or shooting paintings after a bad breakup was, as the critic Barbara Rose wrote in Vogue; “The heroine of her own fairy tale, she slays her own dragons, domesticating dangerous dragons into playful companions.”

The most lovable of these playmates were her Nanas, some of the first of which were drawn at the Chelsea Hotel in 1964, and which are seen on Dundas’s mood board. Saint Phalle once said that her work communicated “dreams of joy,” and these much beloved sculptures, whose name is taken from French slang for girl, are, despite their mythical proportions, buoyant. And while their maker, with her French girl chic, knew the importance of a statement coat, the versatility of a good pair of jeans, the insouciance of a veiled hat, her happy-go-lucky Nanas indulge in short skirts and vibrant kaleidoscopic colors.