Before she died, the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle undertook a monumental mission: for almost two decades she built her Tarot Garden in Capalbio, a small Italian village. A park in which he erected sculptures inspired by the 22 major arcana. Marcelo Zitelli, an Argentine who was Saint Phalle's personal assistant until his death, recalls how he participated in a collaborative and titanic process that involved more than twenty artists, artisans and an entire community.
At 65, Zitelli, now a theater director, actor and plastic artist, recalls in dialogue with Clarín how she became one of the trustees of the artistic legacy of Saint Phalle, a sculptor, filmmaker and writer who spoke openly about feminism, patriarchy and politics. "I didn't know who this woman was, I had no idea," he says.
Zitelli, originally from Río Cuarto, had arrived in Buenos Aires in his 20s to study theater. In February 1987, at the age of 27, he raised some money and went to France, he wanted to do theater in the Gallic country. He arrived in Paris "with two pesos," he says. His wife, Roxana, received him at the Gare de Austerlitz in the capital and recommended that he speak to an acquaintance, another Argentine named Ricardo Menon, who had been Niki's assistant for a decade.
"Ricardo was very sick with AIDS and wanted to find someone to replace him, very little time had been given to him, so he wanted to stop working," explains Marcelo, who agreed to do manual work, fixing the garden of a property in Soisy-sur-École, a town about 40 kilometers from Paris, of less than a thousand inhabitants at the time. There, the sculptor lived.
Niki de Saint Phalle with Marcelo Zitelli in the nineties. They met when the artist was 57 years old. They worked together for more than two decades. (Courtesy Marcelo Zitelli).
"I went to do this garden, which took me a week," Zitelli says. We started talking a lot. I didn't speak French. She spoke to me in Italian, and I answered as best I could and always invited me to lunch and I didn't know who this woman was, I had no idea, then I realized that she was already a world-renowned artist."
Zitelli did not imagine either that a technique he had done in Córdoba capital would open the doors to the artistic world of Niki de Saint Phalle. He had learned to weld and work with heavy materials and the sculptor gave him a challenge: he had two months to help her with sculptures in another project aimed at destigmatizing HIV. Marcelo finished it in ten days. Thus he became her assistant, moved to Soisy-sur-École and participated in and curated several exhibitions of the artist over the next two decades.
A monumental tarot garden
View of a part of The Tarot Garden: on the right The Empress, in the center The Tower and on the left, part of the staircase of The Magician. (Photo: Luis Sartor).
"I knew this was what I was meant to do. It wasn't even my choice, it was my destiny. This garden was based on the tarot deck. Now, what is the tarot? Are they just cards? There is a mystery involved in these letters," says the artist in the introduction of the documentary by German Peter Schamoni entitled "Niki de Saint Phalle: Who's the Monster, Me or You?" (Niki de Saint Phalle: Who is the monster, you or me?, in English).
Today, Il Giardino dei Tarocchi, its name in Italian, is an open-air museum located just over 100 kilometers from Rome and, since 1998 – with the exception of the two years of the pandemic – opens its doors from April to October to receive thousands of visitors. Its conservation and heritage is under the tutelage of the Tarot Garden Foundation. But in 1977, when the land was ceded to the multifaceted artist, in those three hectares of the Tuscan countryside there was only a small village surrounded by nature.
Niki de Saint Phalle, photographed here in 1983, financed part of the project with a perfume of the same name, in her youth she had been a model. [AP Photo/ Herve Merliac]
The sculptures of the open-air museum are divided: there are monumental ones such as The Empress -where Saint Phalle lived for several years-, The Emperor, The Magician, The Tower, The Moon or Justice; and there are more girls like El Diablo, La Rueda de la Fortuna or El Ermitaño. The Frenchwoman made sure to preserve a chronology for posterity and mentioned everyone involved in the project.
"Niki always considered plastic [art] work to be a team effort, not a one-person job," Zitelli says. There are a lot of people who don't want to, don't want to involve others. Niki was the exact opposite, he always, always wanted everyone to show up," says his former assistant.
The result, The Tarot Garden, is a compendium of works at every step of the way: from the mirrored mosaics that cover the sculptures several meters high to the fountains and machines devised by Saint Phalle's second husband, the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, one of the European exponents of kinetic art.
The Empress (or The Sphinx as Niki called her), The Magician and The Priestess were raised on steel bar structures welded by Tinguely alongside Rico Weber and Seppi Imhof. Afterwards, concrete was poured over them and they were molded; according to the page of The Garden of Tarot. In Schamoni's documentary, the artist evokes the initial phase of the project and says: "First of all, this whole network of wires. When everything was grey cement, it looked very, very sad and very melancholy... but it looked very romantic too."
Sculpture of the arcane La Justicia, inside which is another work that represents injustice. (Photo: Luis Sartor).
This was not the only arcane that the French-American reinterpreted: The Force was represented through a Dragon (a common motif in the artist's work), The Hanging is inside a magnificent Tree of Life, The Nameless Arcanum or Death stands as a figure of a woman on a blue horse. Justice has both breasts as its balance and inside, trapped, is an allegory of Injustice made by Tinguely.
Zitelli joined the project when it was almost a decade old. In addition to Niki, Pierre Marie Lejeune, who made the benches in the garden, Alan Davie, who painted the hand representing The Magician, and Venera Finocchiaro, the potter of the project, participated in different stages.
Detail of the sculpture of The Nameless Arcanum (or Death) in the Tarot Garden. (Photo: Luis Sartor).
Finocchiaro was part of the work for the first 10 years. Zitelli explains that he put a ceramic kiln on site and there "taught all employees, most or those who were interested, the subject of ceramics. They produced the pottery in the Tarot Garden itself. Those are ceramics that have been cooked there, sculpted, cooked, painted and glazed, re-cooked and placed." A sample can be seen in the fountain in front of the sculpture of The Magician, a blue snake.
But the garden not only brought together prominent plastic artists, it also forged them. That was the case of Ugo Celletti, the postman from the small Italian town who, at the end of his shift, went to the garden. "Ugo asked me to put him to the test by placing the mirror pieces on the sculptures. He became a true poet in this art," Saint Phalle said.
Curiously, in the artist's masterpiece there were no tarot spreads themselves. When asked to Zitelli: Did Niki never read the tarot?, he answers: "No, no, she did not, she was very afraid of that, I was very afraid of her. Sometimes she would throw two or three cards and nothing else, but she had realized that she had incredible power, she had to visualize things and she didn't want to do it with people because she was so disturbed."
The "small" sculptures and their complexity
Sculpture of the arcane El Mundo, one of the last to be completed and placed in the Tarot Garden. (Photo: Luis Sartor).
At the end of the eighties only the "smallest" sculptures (two meters high) were missing. Zitelli participated in its creation guided by Niki, who by then suffered from respiratory diseases, in part, due to the accumulated pollution of the welding process. Some were made in France and then transported to Italy.
"The process was like this: in principle, Niki started making some sketches, we did six, seven, eight, ten. From those sketches, I built a model," says the Argentine artist. Depending on the sculpture could be 30, 40 or 50 centimeters. That model was made of iron and clay. Once Niki was satisfied with the shape, I would enlarge it to the dimension she wanted."
"For example, El Loco is two and a half meters, so he welded the structure and remade it with the clay in that definitive form; always keeping it moist so that it does not dry out, because it dries out and cracks and falls off," explains Zitelli. But one of the peculiarities of these sculptures is that they were made in polyester resins. To do this, Zitelli sent this second model to the Ateliér Haligon, where they repeated exactly the same sculpture in this material.
Surrounded by thousands of mirrors, the sculpture of El Colgado, one of the works in which Marcelo Zitelli participated. (Garden photo: Luis Sartor).
Some "molds" were more complex to make, he says, because they are hollow structures (which give the effect of a line drawn in space) and the emptying of the polyester resin deserved more attention. This is the case of El Loco or El Colgado. "And then the plastic came back and we painted it," says Marcelo, "Nikki decided how the color was going to be, we could take it back, we could sand it and start again, whatever."
Thus, in 1998 Niki was able to see his project completed. By then, both Tinguely and Menon, the Argentine who was his first assistant, had already died. As a tribute, the artist added the photos of both in an internal chapel she built in the garden. The artist died in 2002, in California, United States.
If any contemporary found Saint Phalle's desire delusional, she proved otherwise. "I identified with one of the cards: El Loco, El Loco is the one who comes and goes through the air, represents the man looking for his spiritual identity and this is what I was doing looking for this garden," says the artist in the documentary.
The sculpture of The Devil imagined and elaborated by Niki de Saint Phalle. (Photo: Luis Sartor).
Valentina, a 52-year-old Milanese visitor who recently visited the place, shared her impressions with this medium: "Although Il Giardino dei Tarocchi is a very busy place full of tourists, it perfectly captures the soul of Niki de Saint Phalle. The thousand reflections of the mirrors and the infinite details make the visit an experience. Children and adults coexist in each of his works. A wonderland, which amazes and teaches."
That message resonates in the words of the artist, who said, "It's not just my garden, it's a garden of everyone who helped me build it." Completing it represented for her her most important statement: "I had this dream of making people work for a common goal to create something beautiful."
Currently, specialists from the Center for Immersive Media Research at Carleton University, in Canada, are doing a 3D survey of the surface of the garden in conjunction with the museum's foundation and the Getty Conservation Institute in California. Just as Gaudí created his Park Güell, Saint Phalle left in Capalbio his majestic Tarot Garden.
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