La Grande Temperance
The central square of the Mie Center for the Arts is dominated by La Grande Temperance, a colourful piece by the French-American sculptor, painter and designer Niki de Saint Phalle (1930 — 2002). The other day, I went to the square and took a couple of photos; here’s a gallery. What follows is a few remarks on the sculpture, all dutifully hyperlinked.
La Grande Temperance is a Nana, a large-breasted, wide-hipped, ample-bodied woman that looks like a prehistoric fertility goddess ironically dressed in a colourful bathing suit. Niki de Saint Phalle exhibited the first series of Nanas in 1965 at a gallery in Paris. These sculptures were followed the next year by Hon, a monumental Nana shown at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. Museum-goers were invited to enter the sculpture through her genitals, which caused a bit of a scandal because it violated decorum. Ever since, the Nana has been the artist’s signature creation.
The sculpture at the Center for the Arts is a replica, a remake of the original Temperance located in the Tarot Garden near the town of Capalbio, close to the coast in the south of the Italian province of Tuscany. This garden is home to a series of twenty-two large sculptures and embodies the most ambitious project undertaken by Niki de Saint Phalle; its construction had been under way for some twenty years — during which the artist lived in the sphinx-like Empress, which holds a cavern equipped with kitchen, bedroom and bathroom — before it opened to the public on May 15, 1998.
While the garden is inspired by Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell in Barcelona, the sculptures themselves represent the twenty-two main Tarot cards, known as the “major arcana.” The Tarot is a deck of seventy-eight playing cards which originated in Italy in the 15th century. Each of the cards shows a different image, most of them depicting a single human or superhuman figure, some of them allegorical (such as Death, or, indeed, Temperance). Whereas Tarot cards were and still are used for playing, many and contradicting theories are being offered on their mystic significance. Some of these theories underpin the practice of using the Tarot for fortune telling.
The Tarocchi of Mantegna (c.1465) are one of the first Tarot decks. They show Temperance with two vases. Pamela Coleman Smith’s deck first appeared in 1909 and shows Temperance with wings and two cups. The wings and the vases, therefore, are traditional attributes of Temperance.
“Temperance” means “moderation” or “self-restraint”. Today’s meaning of “total abstinence from alcoholic beverages” is hardly intended in the earlier allegorical images, but the two vases at least hint in this direction: assuming that Temperance pours water into wine, she makes the beverage less intoxicating. In de Saint Phalle’s treatment, of course, the liquid is red, so the figure seems to be pouring wine into water, which either makes her a contradiction in terms, Extreme Temperance, or invites us to look for other possible meanings.
There is at least one other version of de Saint Phalle’s Temperance at the Mingei Museum in San Diego, California, an institution which dedicated an exhibition to the artist in 1999.
There may be others, but the one version of Temperance I’m familiar with is located at Zürich Main Station in Switzerland. The station, a palace-like structure typical of its period, was built in 1871. Today, the trains no longer enter its great hall because there are too many tracks to fit inside. Long-distance trains now stop in an extension to the original building while regional trains stop in the warren-like maze underground. The old hall now houses a meeting point, pedestrian access to the tracks and the shopping malls below street level, and a great deal of empty space that is put to various uses. On November 14, 1997, in celebration of CFS Swiss Railroad’s 150th anniversary, Niki de Saint Phalle’s sculpture “Guardian Angel” was unveiled: a big Temperance suspended from the great hall’s ceiling.
Poking around the Web with Google’s handy Image Search, I have found a few photos of the Guardian Angel: here, here, here, and here. In addition, this Japanese page includes an image of the Main Station and of the Christmas Market with Guardian Angel.
How did the Zürich Temperance come to be renamed Guardian Angel? Zürich is a protestant city — in fact it was one of the centres of the Reformation back in the 16th century — and protestants traditionally oppose the catholic teaching of guardian angels, the idea that every human being has an individual heavenly protector that keeps him or her out of harm’s way. But with the arrival of the New Age movement in the last few decades, angels have become part of popular culture again. Maybe guardian angels more acceptable to the general population than anything that has to do with the Tarot, which is usually associated with esoteric teachings frowned upon by mainstream Christians of either denomination.
However, the most important reason for the name change is likely to be something else altogether. The sculpture was sponsored — an exact sum was never disclosed — by Switzerland’s largest security firm, whose uniformed officers patrol the station, or used to, anyway, back at the time. As I recall, the firm ran a national ad campaign with the word “Protection” boldly printed across billboards. One of the ads in the series featured de Saint Phalle’s Guardian Angel in the background, establishing a fairly obvious connection between the firm’s services and the sculpture’s new name.
No name change was required here in Mie-ken: a plaque on the plinth reads, in French, “La Grande Temperance”. The connection that the sculpture establishes with its surrounding at the Center for the Arts has probably doesn’t relate to any specific meaning the sculpture itself may have and reflects the artist’s reputation instead. Niki de Saint Phalle is popular with feminists because her Nanas project a positive, powerful image of women, and possibly because their voluminous bodies run counter to the ideal of extreme slenderness celebrated by the fashion industry — an ideal which, many feminists claim, undercuts the self-esteem of most women, who do not conform to it. La Grande Temperance stands right in front of the entrance to the Mie Prefecture Gender Equality Center, an institution, if their name is anything to go by, which fights for women to have more power in this prefecture.
The Niki Museum in Nasu, Tochigi Prefecture, opened in October 1994.
Comments
David :: March 24, 2004
That is a fabulous work of art and what a surprise to find it in the central square of the Mie Center for the Arts. I would be curious to know what is inside…
An additional point: the word nana is actually French slang or “argot” for a girl, young woman or prostitute. It is very commonly used word.
I had not noticed the Zürich Hauptbahn version of the Temperance last time I was there; I will have to look again.
Her art is often seen together with that of Jean Tinguely, perhaps the most famous contemporary Swiss artist, with whom she shared many years.
David www.geneva.ch.vu
I didn’t know that “nana” is still used in current French. Émile Zola published Nana in 1880, a novel named after its protagonist, who is is a prostitute. Three years earlier, Edouard Manet had produced a painting titled Nana which doesn’t leave much doubt about the lady’s profession (note the crane in the background; Paris was awash in Japanese artifacts after the Americans forced Japan to open to international trade).
De Saint Phalle’s early sculptures were papier mâché on chicken wire frames, but starting in 1972 she had her pieces cast in polyester resin by the French Atelier Haligon. In principle, polyester casting isn’t much different from bronze casting, so the sculptures are hollow.
The artist was actually married to Tinguely. They collaborated on projects since the early sixties and she and took charge of Tinguely’s estate after he died in 1991.
When I visited the Museum Jean Tinguely in Basel many years ago, they had a huge Nana on display, but I’m not sure if that piece is part of the permanent collection.
Ah, wait — you wondered what’s inside the Center rather than what’s inside the sculpture? Link for you, including an art map.
Last year, Tawawa’s own Hiroko-san participated in Karadakara, a dance performance held at the Center.
David :: March 25, 2004
Indeed, I was thinking about the inside of the center and not the statue (sorry to be less than than precise). I knew the statues were hollow. However, I had assumed that they were constructed like those from the CowParade of Zürich and Chicago from Beat Seeberger-Quin & Co which are made of fiberglass coated with resin. We have one of these cows just outside of our office, which I think is from the original Zürich show.
David www.geneva.ch.vu
Hm, yeah — those cows. They actually made it to Tokyo, too.
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I didn’t know that the sculpture in the Prefectural center was made by such a famous artist.