NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE).- “I was lucky to discover art,” she said, “because on a psychological level I had everything you need to become a terrorist.”

It was going to be one or the other for Niki de Saint Phalle, who made some of the most joyous art of postwar France and also some of the most menacing. Her colleagues in 1960s Paris caused ruckuses by filling galleries with industrial junk or painting canvases with the bodies of naked models — but none of them went as far as Saint Phalle, who used live ammunition to shoot up oil paintings and, by extension, the men of the cultural establishment. Even when her art turned more lighthearted later, there was always something beneath it: a risk, a rumbling, a sense it could all go off the rails.

Freedom through violence, creation through destruction, pleasure through fear: These were the artistic antinomies of Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), whose gun-toting performances and larger-than-life sculpted women have received more respect in Europe than in America. New York, where she lived in her childhood, has never afforded her a full-scale museum exhibition — or not until now, with the opening of “Niki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life,” at MoMA PS1.

It’s one of the most surprising shows of the season, with a heavy emphasis on her later, monumental work in parks and other outdoor spaces: walk-in structures, somewhere between architecture and public art, where caves are covered in mirrors and monsters’ pink tongues turn into slides.

It’s a revisionist show, which is curious for one this overdue. By valorizing the later public works and putting the ’60s in shadow, PS1 curator Ruba Katrib and her colleague Josephine Graf offer a partial view of an artist that many Americans still don’t know in full. But “Structures for Life” brings a cannonade of color to Queens, and it’s one of two opportunities to rediscover Saint Phalle in New York right now.

In Manhattan, the gallery Salon 94 has moved into a beaux-arts mansion on East 89th Street that previously housed the National Academy of Design, and there you’ll find motorized sculptures Saint Phalle made in collaboration with her second husband, Swiss kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely, and three of the totemic sculptures of women she called Nanas.

These large, faceless figures, with spherical breasts and broad hips and hot-colored patterning, may now look like benign ’60s artifacts. But for Saint Phalle the Nanas were fierce things, threatening the patriarchy, with the potential to become what she saw deep inside herself: une terroriste, with the feminine article.

Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle was born in the wealthy Paris suburbs to an American mother and a French aristocrat father; a few years later the family moved to New York. Both were fervent Catholics, and both were monstrous parents. When she was 11, her father raped her — a trauma she disclosed much later, in an illustrated book from 1994 on view at PS1.

“All men are rapists,” she wrote. “I had understood that everything they taught me was false.” (Two of her siblings later killed themselves.)

She got expelled from both Catholic school and Brearley, and while still a teenager she began working as a model, appearing on the covers of Life and Vogue. At 18 she married author Harry Mathews, and not long after she was committed to a mental institution, where the doctors first administered electroshock therapy, then encouraged art making. Once discharged, Saint Phalle moved to Spain, where the architecture of Antoni Gaudí — particularly his Parc Güell in Barcelona, with its undulating porticos and mosaic-covered benches — would decisively influence her later public works.

At her first exhibition, in Paris in 1961, Saint Phalle hung a white canvas on the wall, picked up a rifle, and then let it rip. The bullets pierced paint-filled plastic bags beneath the canvas, which bled out to create a drippy abstraction. This and subsequent “Tirs” (or “Shoots”) were performance art in the form of symbolic murder — of gestural abstract painting, of the artist as expressive visionary, of her father, of all fathers.




And sure, they were stunts. Shooting at crucifixes or Kennedy effigies scores pretty low on subtlety. But they won her both fame and credibility, and she was invited to join a group of artists working with collage, industrial materials and performances, known as the nouveaux réalistes. Many of these Parisians, including Tinguely, Daniel Spoerri, Jacques Villeglé and Arman, remain stubbornly underrated here, although their work was not so unlike their American counterparts. (Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, Noah Purifoy and Bruce Conner might have all been nouveaux réalistes.)

The PS1 exhibition moves quickly over Saint Phalle’s “Tirs,” and skips entirely the subsequent gaudy sculptures of brides and monsters, to reach her other breakthrough of the ’60s: the Nanas, which recast her rage at the patriarchy into autonomous, strangely jolly prima donnas. She made these plump and often pregnant figures from plaster or polyester and painted their surfaces with solid-colored stripes and black outlines. Frequently they had concentric circles, like targets, on their breasts or bellies.

From some angles they recall piñatas. From others, Stone Age fertility statues. And sometimes, really, they look like killers. Saint Phalle often acknowledged the influence of “King Kong” on her art, and in a 1966 ballet (done with Tinguely and viewable at Salon 94), a giant Nana wearing red pumps descended from the flies to crush the male dancers.

“Nana” is a French slang term for a woman, something like “chick” or “broad,” although it also evokes Émile Zola’s fictional courtesan Nana, painted by Édouard Manet in the late 19th century. They could be as tall as a building, or small as a paperweight.

The queen of the Nanas was “Hon,” which she made with Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt in 1966: 75 feet long and lying on her back, with a door to her insides between her open legs. They built her for a show at what was then the coolest museum on the planet, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and some 70,000 Swedes patiently queued to penetrate the exhibition, where adults could look at paintings, kids could go down a slide, and everyone could drink milk at a bar in one of the breasts.

If “Hon” rethought the Nana as a permeable, inhabitable figure, the project also prefigured the public works that the PS1 show spotlights. For a playground in Jerusalem in 1971, Saint Phalle designed a black-and-white golem, its rippling walls indebted to Gaudí, with three slides formed from its three giant tongues. (Parents were scandalized; the kids loved it.) In 1983, she and Tinguely created the Stravinsky Fountain near Paris’ still-new Centre Pompidou, where his creaking machines spat water alongside her colorful Nanas and birds.

She spent decades on a garish Gesamtkunstwerk in Tuscany, Italy, called the Tarot Garden, where she and dozens of collaborators built massive occult structures, including a mirror-covered Empress that also served as her home on site. Much of the funding for the Tarot Garden came from the sale of perfumes; at PS1, her sales expertise gets full Warholian honors.

Saint Phalle always wrote alongside her art making, and this show includes many hand-drawn pages for a book on AIDS and its prevention, published in English as “AIDS, You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands.” First written and illustrated in 1986, later adapted for French TV, this openhearted book features Nana-like dancers proclaiming “I love condoms,” and beautiful edicts to love and care for people with HIV and AIDS, long before many political leaders even acknowledged the syndrome.

Yet the PS1 show’s concentration on public engagement and public constructions does make her seem a bit too congenial. It gives us the “good Niki,” with her unpolished, self-taught aesthetic, her communal construction projects and celebration of play, her AIDS advocacy, her confessional diaries. It muffles the “bad Niki,” slayer of good Parisian taste, who wanted art to be “as beautiful as seeing someone killed, or the atom bomb.”

And for a show concerned with the artist’s social commitments, it treads rather gingerly over her support for the American civil rights movement. We get a dreamy frieze from 1968 of Nanas of all colors, but not Saint Phalle’s large Black Nanas, which today feel bold and awkward in equal measure.

At Salon 94, by contrast, the racialized Nana is on center stage. The gallery has installed three large sculptures in a winter garden that echoes the design of her first solo museum show, called “Nana Power,” at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1967. (“We have Black Power, why not Nana Power?” she said at the opening.) One of them is called “Black Dancer,” balanced on one foot, wearing a miniskirt like a mushroom cap. Another, also on one foot and playing with a beach ball, is titled “Le Péril Jaune” (“Yellow Peril”), from 1969; she has flowers on her breasts and flesh the color of a taxicab. She is a heroic figure, but Saint Phalle’s repurposing of a racist trope for its title carries a serious shock, in the Vietnam era and no less today.

It’s natural to be left uncomfortable by these painted giantesses. They’re more than half a century old. But museums purged of uncomfortable things are also playgrounds of a sort, and Saint Phalle rarely gave audiences the fully approved version of anything. It’s lovely to build a place to gather, but she was both a builder and a destroyer. She was a maker of structures to live in, and a pillager who shot to kill.

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