Trencadis - Caroline Deyns

"I was lucky to meet art because psychologically, I had everything it takes to become a terrorist."
— Niki de Saint-Phalle

Back in 2022 I walked through that massive Niki de Saint-Phalle retrospective at the Grand Palais. Knocked me sideways. I thought I knew her work—she was already an icon when I was a kid. Turns out I knew nothing.

Most people reduce her to those colorful Nanas sculptures and her collaborations with Jean Tinguely. But there's so much more. A 20th-century critic called her a "superb witch, violent, aggressive." That's closer to the truth.

Caroline Deyns' book gave me that same gut punch. It's not exactly a novel, not exactly a biography. It's something else entirely—a literary collage that mirrors the artist's own technique.

Breaking and rebuilding

Here's the brilliant part: Deyns uses trencadis, the mosaic technique Niki de Saint-Phalle loved. Take broken pieces, shattered fragments, and build something new. "A brief journey from dislocation to reconstruction," as the book puts it.

For Niki, art wasn't optional. It was survival. At eleven, her father raped her. That trauma spiraled into depression, landed her in what they still called an asylum in the 1950s. "I started painting with the crazy people," she said later.

By 1956, this stunning young woman had already put serious distance between herself and her aristocratic Franco-American family. She abandoned her husband and kids to move into an artists' collective in Paris. An autodidact working with salvaged materials. She literally rebuilt herself through creation.

"The colors are actually black sadnesses dressed up as Harlequin, making sure no one recognizes them: despair trying to go incognito."

People described her as "lively, twisted, determined." She channeled the violence suffocating her into her work, using art as psychoanalysis. Radical stuff.

Fragments of a portrait

Deyns does her own deconstruction and reconstruction job here. She mixes quotes, interviews, letters, biographical facts, artwork analysis, testimonies. Sometimes she even speaks in Niki's voice.

The result? A composite portrait of a rebellious feminist artist who saw marriage and motherhood as slavery. A woman who put femininity—in all its forms—at the center of her work.

I loved how this genre-mixing approach honors both Niki de Saint-Phalle's creative process and the complex, tormented woman behind it. Deyns shows how artistic creation can literally be a matter of survival. How work becomes a mirror of the psyche.

It's a genuinely original literary object. Art lovers will dig it, but so will anyone who wants something that breaks the mold.