Modern art as a zip fastener between natural environment and social space, a territory meant as garden and landscape. Here's one example among the various Tuscan places which has become a favourite destination for lovers of art "en plein air" .
The Garden of the Tarot in Capalbio, visited every year by tens of thousands of lovers bears the unmistakable signature an Internationally famed artist, as fragile, slender and delicate in the body as determined, strong and decided in the spirit: Niki de Saint Phalle. The suffuse, complex magic of his garden hands out open-eye dreams to adults and children alike. They are Tarot, sparkling ghosts, giant sculptures under which the charm of the East can be breathed.
Beautiful and charming she posed very young as a model for Vogue and other famous magazines, not letting this distract her from what others had "drawn" for her: only nineteen she was already the wife of a young man of excellent social position, from whom she had a son. Later however she enacted her rebellion, which influenced every choice in the years to come. She left her husband and started her adventure as an artist. All her production is under the heading of unconventionality. In the 50's she starts with the "assemblage", built with everyday objects joined in original compositions; emblematic was her "Portrait of my lover in love ": his head is a shooting target.
In the sixties she was part of the Nouveau Réalisme, as only woman of the group, and she designed the famous "shooting paintings", bas-reliefs on which balloon were applied, filled with colour on which to shoot. Violence and beauty co-exists in these works, where the loss of usual reckoning points brings about, as juxtaposition, a strong attachment to life and its values.
From the mid-sixties the artist started her poetical research around the feminine, with rounded shapes and merry colours: it all expresses the joy for her re-conquered freedom. Even her Garden of Tarot in Gravicchio can be interpreted as a great monument to happiness where the juxtaposition between male and female disappears and the soft shapes of the "Major Arcana" are completed by Jean Tinguely's black "useless mechanisms".
The park is open from the 15th of May to the 10th of October from 2.30 pm to 7 pm, whereas from the 1st of November to the 9th of may the opening times are from 9 am to 1 pm. Closed on Sundays and holidays. The ticket is 20 thousand lira. Free for children under 7 years of age and for everyone the first Saturday of every month.
(Picture: From the Garden of Tarot: "The Moon - Card number XVIII")
Niki de Saint Phalle
Comune di Capalbio
