Niki de Saint Phalle Shooting Painting American Embassy 1961

  • MoMA, Floor 4, 408 The David Geffen Wing

Saint Phalle created Shooting Painting American Embassy during “Homage to David Tudor,” a performance program she staged, with the artists Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jean Tinguely, at the theater of the American Embassy in Paris on June 20, 1961. Over the course of the evening, each artist deployed strategies of indeterminacy—actions whose results are left open to chance—to make works onstage in front of an audience.

For her contribution, Saint Phalle hired a sharpshooter to fire a rifle at paint-filled balloons attached to a slab of wood covered in white plaster and paint with various objects encrusted in it; the bursting balloons created streams of brightly colored pigment that poured down over the work’s surface. A toy gun, a bucket seat, a hatchet, and an old shoe are among the items that were absorbed and reimagined as the stuff of painting.

This work is one of Saint Phalle’s “shooting paintings,” a series, begun in February of 1961, that repositioned the art of painting and assemblage as something explicitly violent. The sole female member of the Nouveaux Réalistes (New Realists) group, which championed the “poetic recycling of urban, industrial, and advertising reality,” Saint Phalle was a key figure among a generation of artists exploring the potential of found and everyday objects through performance-based practice.

Publication excerpt from MoMA Highlights: 375 Works from The Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2019)
Medium
Paint, plaster, wood, plastic bags, shoe, twine, metal seat, axe, metal can, toy gun, wire mesh, shot pellets, and other objects on wood
Dimensions
96 3/8 x 25 7/8 x 8 5/8" (244.8 x 65.7 x 21.9 cm)
Credit
Gift of the Niki Charitable Art Foundation
Object number
860.2011
Copyright
© Niki Charitable Art Foundation
Department
Painting and Sculpture

Installation views

We have identified these works in the following photos from our exhibition history.

How we identified these works

In 2018–19, MoMA collaborated with Google Arts & Culture Lab on a project using machine learning to identify artworks in installation photos. That project has concluded, and works are now being identified by MoMA staff.

If you notice an error, please contact us at [email protected].

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].

Feedback

This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please send feedback to [email protected].