The Shooting Paintings

In the early 1960s Saint Phalle was living and working in Paris surrounded by artists, curators and art critics. The violence of her assemblages grew into a new series of works – the Shooting Paintings – that were to stimulate and shock a wider public, and establish her as a major artist internationally. 

The Shooting Paintings, a development of her ‘Target Portraits’ in which the head of her lover was replaced by a dartboard, explored the violence inherent in much abstract art of the time, and can be read as a parody of the machismo of action painting. Embedding pockets filled with paint and foodstuffs in thick layers of plaster on canvas, Saint Phalle and invited collaborators, including Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, shot at the paintings to make them ‘bleed’. Like her assemblages, these works became a release for the artist’s outrage allowing her to find a new creativity born from destruction. It was at one of the first ‘shoot-outs’ that she met Pierre Restany, the critic and theorist behind the Nouveau Realistes, who invited her to join the group.

Performing public ‘shoot-outs’ in France and America, Saint Phalle defied all that angered her. She shot at patriarchal society and political crisis. Driven by contemporary events, as much as by personal anguish, many of the Shooting Paintings have a political resonance. Kennedy-Khrushchev 1962, for example, was made shortly after a meeting between the two leaders of the political superpowers. The critical acclaim achieved by these works and performances brought about an equality with her fellow male artists – something she strove to maintain for the rest of her life.