SAINT-PHALLE NIKI DE (1930-2002)

Lot 348
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Estimation :
2000 - 3000 EUR
Result with fees
Result : 4 680EUR
SAINT-PHALLE NIKI DE (1930-2002)
L'été des serpents Autograph manuscript titled and signed Canary Islands, December 1992, 31 in-4 pages in black then blue ink, paginated, plus a signed title page. Numerous erasures and corrections and some passages crossed out. 6 leaves have been cut out and reassembled by sticky tape. Niki de Saint Phalle recounts her mutilated childhood, the suffering and trauma caused by the crime her father committed when she was the same age as her granddaughter, Bloum, to whom this long and terrible confession is addressed. It was in the summer of 1942, in a vacation home in the United States, that her father subjected her to all kinds of criminal touching: "For the little girl, rape is death. There is only one solution: the law. The law to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Prison for rapists of little girls. That's the only way to control them: through fear. When I was 11 years old I felt expelled from society. This beloved father became an object of hatred, the world had shown me its hypocrisy, I understood that everything I was taught was wrong. ...the Summer of Snakes was when my father, this banker, this great bourgeois, tried to put his sex in my mouth. The artist explains that these were the after-effects and how she decided to devote herself to painting, after a stay in a psychiatric hospital. She talks about her film Daddy: "Jean Tinguely, my family and almost all the press were outraged by this film. Only my mother, a few critics and Jacques Lacan defended me. Since the psychiatrists she consulted did not always believe in the reality of what she had experienced, she feels forever in solidarity "with all those whom society and the law exclude and crush. ...] I embrace you, dear Bloum, with great tenderness. Now you know a little more about your grandmother. Love. Niki". The artist wrote a very similar letter to his daughter Laura, Bloum's mother, and it is the text of that letter that was published in facsimile by La Dif
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