Fragrance house

Niki D.st Phalle

Niki D.st Phalle takes its name from Niki de Saint Phalle, the French-born artist who spent much of her childhood and adolescence in New York City. She began painting in 1950, moved to Paris in 1952, and chose art after a 1953 hospitalization ended her plans to act. Her early-1960s shooting paintings led to her association with Nouveau Réalisme, while the Nanas became a major direction from the mid-1960s, including the 1965 exhibition devoted to them and the large-scale Hon project in Stockholm in 1966. In the late 1970s, she began developing the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, a project comprising 22 monumental sculptures inspired by the Tarot’s Major Arcana. The name’s clearest fragrance legacy is its eponymous 1982 perfume, presented in New York on August 30 that year in a blue-and-gold bottle topped with two intertwined colored-glass snakes; proceeds helped finance the Tarot Garden. The garden opened in 1997. Saint Phalle received the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture in 2000 and died in California in 2002.