The lasting echo of Niki de Saint Phalle's Nanas

Few sculptural figures of the twentieth century have communicated joy as directly as the Nanas of Niki de Saint Phalle. First appearing in the early 1960s, these rotund, dancing, brightly painted women broke decisively from the cool restraint that had defined much postwar sculpture. They were an act of defiance as much as an act of art: voluminous, unashamed, coloured like sweets, and built at a scale that refused to be ignored. For Saint Phalle, who had spent years working through the dense, symbol-laden relief paintings of her "Tirs" period, the Nanas were a way of returning the female body to the centre of art without apology.

The name itself, borrowed from a French word for a girl or a young woman, carries an affectionate, almost teasing tone. Saint Phalle once suggested that the figures were her own body multiplied: a refusal of the singular, idealised nude that art history had long imposed on women. From small painted figures to monumental public works, the Nanas reshaped how sculpture could inhabit a city, a museum, or a living room. Their legacy lives on in the work of younger artists, in public collections, and in the slow rebalancing of the stories museums are willing to tell about modern art.

Origins and meaning of the Nana

Saint Phalle began sculpting the Nanas in 1963, in the wake of her collaboration with Jean Tinguely and Per Olof Ultvedt on the Hon sculpture for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. The experience of constructing a reclining female figure that visitors could walk into seems to have unlocked something in her practice. Where earlier reliefs had been built from debris and pierced with paint-filled bags, the Nanas were made from a softer logic: shaped armatures, often built over wire and fabric, then wrapped in polyester and painted in saturated, unmodulated colour.

The figures were never portraits. Saint Phalle described them as autobiographical but not personal, an approach that allowed her to suggest universal states through individual bodies. A Nana might dance, lie back, give birth, or hold a serpent, each pose drawing on a vocabulary that felt at once ancient and startlingly modern. Critics in the 1960s sometimes read the rounded forms as fertility figures, an interpretation Saint Phalle tolerated without confirming, perhaps because the readings multiplied the work's meaning rather than closing it down.

Scale, colour, and the body as sculpture

Scale was central to the Nana project. From the beginning, Saint Phalle made her figures in multiple sizes, from objects that could sit on a shelf to works that towered over the streets of cities such as Paris, Florence, Jerusalem, and Hanover. The very first monumental Nana, Hon – en katedral in Sweden, was followed decades later by giants like Gwendolyn in the Tuileries and the towering Cyclop figures at her own sculpture park in Italy. Standing among them, the viewer is forced into a different relationship with the female body than the one offered by traditional monumental sculpture.

Colour did much of the work. Saint Phalle applied her surfaces in flat planes of red, blue, yellow, black, and white, often with a deliberately naive directness that echoed folk art and the French arte brut tradition. The painted skin of a Nana does not describe anatomy; it announces presence. In doing so, it set the stage for generations of women artists who understood colour as a way to claim space rather than simply decorate it, a conversation that continues in contemporary practice.

Public commissions and urban joy

By the late 1960s and 1970s, Saint Phalle was being asked to make Nanas for public spaces across Europe, the United States, and Asia. The Golem and Gwendolyn in Jerusalem, the Nana noire in the Tuileries, and the sprawling figures of the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris (a collaboration with Tinguely and Klein, among others) brought the Nanas into the daily rhythm of urban life. Children clambered over their limbs, tourists took photographs, and commuters walked past as if these enormous women had always been there.

This was a deliberate political move. Saint Phalle believed that public art should be free, accessible, and resistant to the hushed reverence of the white cube. The Nanas were tactile, friendly, and impossible to ignore. They were also expensive to produce and maintain, which led Saint Phalle to develop a more modular practice in her later years, working with assistants to realise designs that could be installed in shopping centres, hospitals, and civic plazas around the world.

Influence on later women artists

The reach of the Nanas into subsequent generations of women sculptors is difficult to overstate. Artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Yayoi Kusama, and Tracey Emin have all, in different ways, claimed a female body that is awkward, excessive, or unidealised, a lineage that runs directly through Saint Phalle's practice. Younger Australian artists working in public sculpture and installation, including practitioners based in Sydney and Melbourne, have cited her use of colour and bodily scale as a permission slip for a less guarded approach to the figure.

The Nanas also reshaped how women artists approached the natural world. Saint Phalle's serpent-women, her tree-entwined figures, and her collaborations with architects and landscape designers suggested that the body and the environment could be designed together rather than placed in opposition. The same impulse surfaces in a recent reading of the desert sublime, where landscape is read through a female body that refuses to disappear. The comparison is not a direct one, but the sensibility resonates across continents and decades.

The Nanas in Australia and local resonance

Saint Phalle's work has a particular history in Australia, where the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne has been a key institutional supporter. Her monumental L'Heure Bleue was a centrepiece of the NGV's sculpture programs in the late 1990s, and the gallery holds several of her prints, paintings, and small bronzes. Australian audiences who encountered these works in the 1990s were introduced to a kind of public sculpture that felt distinctly different from the geometric abstraction then dominating local commissions, and the effect lingered.

Contemporary Australian sculptors have continued to draw on the Nana vocabulary. Sydney-based artists working in fibre and polymer have produced brightly painted figures that sit somewhere between homage and parody, and public art programs in Melbourne and Adelaide have commissioned rounded, colourful forms for new urban precincts. Australian arts funding, distributed through bodies such as the Australia Council and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, has made it possible for these commissions to exist at a scale that would have been unimaginable in Saint Phalle's early years. The country's copyright legislation, the Copyright Act 1968, has also shaped how reproductions of her figures can circulate in educational and commercial contexts, a quiet but constant negotiation that continues to determine how her visual legacy is shared across the country.

Where the legacy lives now

Nearly two decades after Saint Phalle's death in 2002, the Nanas continue to appear in exhibitions, books, and film retrospectives. The Saint Phalle estate works actively with museums to keep the figures on view, and reproductions of her work appear on everything from tote bags to public mosaics. Her experimental films, which have been less visible than her sculptures, are beginning to circulate more widely through curated screenings, and a current slate of new Blu-ray releases includes documentary material that brings her practice to viewers who cannot visit the major retrospective venues in person.

The Nana's most enduring contribution may be philosophical rather than formal. She offered a model of the female figure that was generous rather than decorative, communal rather than isolated, and playful without being trivial. For a generation of artists and audiences who had grown tired of the cool ironies of postmodern sculpture, the Nanas felt like a return to feeling, to colour, and to the body. The conversation she opened continues in unexpected places, from the rooms of contemporary galleries to small craft studios in regional Australia, where a painted papier-mâché figure might still carry a trace of her hand.

Practical ways to bring the Nana spirit into your own practice

• Visit a Saint Phalle exhibition in person, such as the ongoing displays at the NGV, to experience scale and colour as they were intended.
• Work with bold, flat areas of colour rather than blended skin tones, allowing the painted surface to read as design rather than illusion.
• Build figures at a range of sizes, from hand-held maquettes to life-size forms, to understand how scale changes the meaning of the body.
• Place finished works in public or shared spaces, including shopfronts, libraries, and gardens, to test how they behave outside the white cube.
• Read widely across women artists who treat the figure as a site of joy, including the recent essay on Emily Carr's nocturnes, which offers a complementary vision of women and landscape.
• Keep a sketchbook of poses drawn from everyday movement: dancing, sleeping, holding a child, laughing, to widen the visual vocabulary beyond the standing nude.
• Photograph or document your own work in public, and share it generously, understanding that visibility is part of the legacy Saint Phalle claimed for women in art.

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