Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten — Grand Palais
As a wholly natural encounter between two major figures of 20th-century art, who shared their lives, and the visionary curator who journeyed alongside them, the exhibition Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten also marks the start of a collaboration between the Centre Pompidou and the Grand Palais.
In contrast to this deserved popular fervor, the overall route through the exhibition—ailing, sombre, and less explosive than expected—struggles to capture the insurrectionary energy that drove these creators. The succession of rooms, with their inconsistent volumes, fragments the narrative so much that the coherence of this tripartite gathering is diluted. We know the fertile exchanges between Saint Phalle, Tinguely, and Hulten; here, they are only intermittently apparent in the physicality of the works, and the dialogue between them is never fully obvious. The show wavers constantly between a personal retrospective—with reconstructed fragments of past exhibitions—and a collective evocation. As for the Grand Palais itself, despite renovations, it remains a difficult space to inhabit, proving ill-suited to host the rebellious, generous spirit of these artists. Where others, such as Bill Viola a few years ago, embraced the monumentality of the venue, the scenography here retreats into a classical, almost overly restrained presentation of works—often stripped down and far removed from the spirit animating iconic creations like the Fontaine Stravinsky — Fountain of Automata, the Tarot Garden, or the Cyclop.
Of course, the curatorial team does not skimp on documentation: archival films, correspondence, and preparatory drawings abound, providing a rich context and, perhaps most importantly, emphasizing the collective dimension (beyond the two artists alone) of works shaped by encounters, discoveries, and site-specific creation. But the intellectual framework—particularly the critique of industrialization and consumer society—remains on the sidelines. Tinguely’s machines, conceived to be ephemeral, self-destructive, and playful, are here museified, fixed in a preserved state that extinguishes their original vitality. This choice raises a fascinating question—left unexplored here—about how to preserve works that lived through their very alteration. Likewise, Saint Phalle’s Tirs (Shooting Paintings), deprived of their performative element but contextualized by the inevitable photographs of the artist, are reduced to their plastic presence—strong, yes, but stripped of their subversive charge.
The monumental, which for them was part of a total gesture, is strangely diminished. The spectacular is muted—perhaps due to the constraints of the space—but this restraint is not compensated for by any heightened conceptual tension. Even the largest works seem diminished, dwarfed by a display that fails to restore the scale, color, and boldness still visible in archival images of a project such as the Crocrodrome.
One leaves with the feeling of a missed opportunity: faced with Tinguely’s mad machines and Saint Phalle’s absolute women—works conceived to vibrate, to shock, to provoke, but also to act and be acted upon—the Grand Palais offers a softened reflection. The route, searching for a definitive angle, remains unresolved: neither fully commemorative, nor truly critical, nor wholly alive. Confronted with Tinguely’s crazy machines and Saint Phalle’s absolute women—works that once made heads spin, vibrating with the rebellious fire they instilled—the Grand Palais delivers a half-tone reflection, still groping for the definitive perspective that could ideally address the rich constellation of questions posed by these artists of vision and vitality, of making and of the vibrant.
Lana Dali & Guillaume Benoit
