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Niki de Saint Phalle has always struck me as a sort of thinking French person's Beryl Cook, with her big, bulbous, brightly painted women - figures she called Nanas. Or perhaps it's just that my image of her has been shaped by visits to the Pompidou Centre, which not only houses the jolly Stravinsky Fountain she created with her husband Jean Tinguely, but a shop full of inflatable Nanas. And now the shop at Tate Liverpool, which this week opens a De Saint Phalle retrospective, is full of them, too. Her accessibility seemed to have removed her from the world of serious art by the time of her death, at 71, in 2002 - without making her famous at all outside France. That was what I thought - but I'd forgotten about Daddy.
I'd even forgotten the letter she once sent me, declaring that this 1973 film was her attempt to deal with her memories of an abusive father, and not, as some have claimed, the creepy fantasy of her collaborator, director Peter Whitehead. In Daddy, a bizarre pastiche of late Visconti, a badly made-up aristocrat plays "games" with his daughter, "Niki"; the camera broods on the fine house and landscape, and the little girl's stripy stockings. Even in the context of avant-garde film making, it contains some extremely disturbing scenes.
De Saint Phalle, as this film reveals, came from an aristocratic French background, although she grew up in New York. She started making art after a nervous breakdown in her early 20s, and throughout her long career was always in some sense an "outsider artist", bringing a naive, spiky sensibility into a sophisticated art world.
Daddy starts to explain the broken toys and bridal dresses that haunt her rich, baroque art. It doesn't leave you with any illusion that she is a cosy artist. Throughout the show, danger looms. "Grotesque vitality" was the phrase I found myself mumbling.
It begins, this terrible energy, after some dull early works, when she starts throwing darts at a portrait of her lover to create her work Saint Sebastian. Then she buys a gun. In the early 1960s, she began loading boards of wood with plastic bags full of paint. She put on her special shooting suit and blasted away at them, inviting friends such as Robert Rauschenberg to take potshots.
She called the works made with a gun "Target" paintings, drawing an explicit parallel with her friend Jasper Johns' Targets. The thing is, the paintings that resulted from what sound like hugely enjoyable happenings endure as works of art long after the creative fun has ended. You intuit something of the casualness, energy and pleasure. And among the pockets of exploded paint, De Saint Phalle's demons start to materialise, demons that loom larger and larger in the show, climaxing with a statue of the devil himself.
It's tempting to say that, after the Target paintings, De Saint Phalle never did anything first-rate again. The reason may have been French nationalism. Early on, she was quite transatlantic. One of the paintings here was shot at, for example, by a hired marksman during a famous performance at the American embassy in Paris, when she shared the stage with Rauschenberg and Johns. Yet this very event led to her being asked to join the New Realists, an aggressively French alternative to American Pop. It was, frankly, the wrong time to choose to be a French artist, in the dying days of the modern world's first avant garde. Her late work has something of the end of surrealism, of Left Bank occultist byways. Even her Nanas are not just excessive women, but are literally meant as "goddesses".
And this is where my scepticism stops. Yes, New Realism is a poor cousin of Pop, and French art by 1970 was not what it had been in 1907. But what a character this artist is - how wayward and engaging. In the end, even the Nanas seem not cosy, but immense and formidable. You see how serious she was about the goddess-power of these colossal women, born of Picasso's Bathers and Rubens' goddesses, whose most spectacular version she created at Stockholm's Moderna Museet in 1966, on a scale that filled the museum. It would work in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, though it has a detail unlike anything there to date - a door between her legs.
This exhibition reveals Niki de Saint Phalle to be one of the most provocative and - I've chosen the word carefully - demonic European artists of the past 50 years. It turns out, too, that she was creative to the end.
In the 1970s, after seeing Gaudí's Park Güell in Barcelona, she dreamed up a sculpture garden based on the tarot pack. An Italian patron offered her land, and she completed her Tarot Garden in Garavicchio, Tuscany, four years before her death. The drawings for it at Tate Liverpool made me want to see this weird place, to sit at the table that represents the card called The Empress, to stand at the foot of her tottering Tower.
The garden works because the tarot pack is one of Europe's most seductive arcana. The oldest surviving tarot cards were made for the 15th-century Dukes of Milan: they are hand-painted Renaissance masterpieces. Yet De Saint Phalle based her garden on the coarser, more popular French deck: unlike the medieval packs, which had their most ill-omened images superstitiously removed, it features the ultimate arcanum, the wildest card of all: Le Diable.
De Saint Phalle's Devil stands in Tate Liverpool in lurid triumph, nude and winged and nearly lifesize (in the Tarot Garden itself he is colossal). He is flanked by two servile demons, in a sculpture that precisely re-creates the design of the Devil card from the 18th-century Marseilles pack.
I'm surprised no one has yet published a thriller called The Saint Phalle Code: unlike the art of Da Vinci, whose occult references exist only in the minds of beholders, her Tarot Garden is laden with occult significance.
Most strikingly, the tarot features powerful images of women: the Popess, the Empress, Temperance. There's a sculpture of Temperance in this show, joyously bulbous; the medieval symbol of moderation has become a Nana.
It can still be efficacious, her half-forgotten black magic - dredged as it is from the ashes of surrealism. What makes European art European is its heritage of myth. On this continent, everything's an old story. European art comes back always to the ancient gods and devils - the bulls of Lascaux haunt Picasso's Minotaur, and Stonehenge shadows Josef Beuys' Tramstop. With her ghostly white brides, one of whom rides a phantom horse made of bric- a-brac like something out of a scary rustic festival, De Saint Phalle kept delving deep into the European psyche. What makes her art live is the darkness she found there: The Hanged Man, the Devil - and Daddy
Josh England
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