Last Night I Had a Dream

In the late 1960s Saint Phalle returned to the mythical ideas and creatures of her early paintings. She began to create narrative groupings in both sculpture and drawing that once more drew upon her her dreams and vivid imagination. In 1968 Saint Phalle made an eighteen-part mystical relief, Last Night I Had a Dream, comprised of remembered moments from a dream including dancing nanas, serpents and monsters. The relief, on display here, was first shown in 1968 at her solo show at the Galerie Alexandre Iolas in Paris.

Saint Phalle’s drawings are like pages of a diary. She mixes text and image to reveal her innermost thoughts and fears in works that retain a certain irony and humour by combining reality with her imaginary creatures. Although deeply personal to the artist, her drawings and sculptural reliefs have a universality of expression. They illustrate a joy of life, exuberance and the depth of human emotion. In these works Saint Phalle revisits the flat, naïve and child-like style used in her early paintings.

Although much of Saint Phalle’s work came from individual circumstance, through her drawings she transferred private thought and imagination to the public realm. They also reveal some of the motivations behind the iconic Nana series. Sweet Sexy Clarice 1968, a drawing dedicated to Clarice Rivers (wife of the artist Larry Rivers), shows Clarice drawn as a Nana. They pre-empt the publication of her autobiography, Mon Secret1993, one of the most valuable insights into her upbringing and work.