Generous, charming and cosmopolitan, Ted Tourtellotte led a rich life filled with travel, friends and art. Always gracious and respectful, he cultivated deep relationships with those he met and left lasting impressions on the acquaintances he made. He was considered a close friend by Joan Fontaine and spent time with French President Francois Mitterrand but it was his enduring friendship with Niki de Saint Phalle that was most dear to him.
Born in Wilburton, Oklahoma in 1928, Ted attended Oklahoma A&M College before joining the Army to serve in the Korean War. During his time in the service, he earned a Purple Heart after being wounded and evading capture behind enemy lines and competed for the Army in the 1953 World Modern Pentathlon Championship. Upon his return to civilian life, he embarked on a career with Air France in New York and in 1964 achieved his dream job, North American Director of Public Relations. He met with VIPs and diplomats, splitting his time between New York and Paris where he kept houses and it was through a mutual Parisian friend, Christian DuMonteil, that he first made the acquaintance of Niki.
While the two became close during their time together in France, it was upon Niki’s move to La Jolla, California, near the San Diego house that Ted had retired to, that they became almost inseparable. Mornings began with a phone call. Some days the calls included Niki and Ted laughing for 10 minutes at a time or “barking” into the phone to exercise their facial muscles. They practiced yoga, walked on the beach, meditated, dined together, attended art openings and dance reviews. They went to the movies and attended the theater. As Ted recounted in an interview,
We used to go walking along the beach every afternoon at 5:30. I'd pick her up at the studio and then we would walk on the beach from an hour and we would talk or say nothing. And it made no difference one way or the other, and we walked from the beach to the thing that goes out in the water, it's a wharf [...] then back again; it was about a mile or so. Niki was not strong physically and the afternoon walks and the sea air really made her feel good, so then we'd go back to her place, have a bowl of soup and then she'd continue to work through the evening and then I'd get home about 10 or 11 and I'd call her the next morning at 7:30...
Playful and silly, they basked in their time together. Each felt a deep caring for the other, always protecting and nurturing, comforting and supporting.
Ted remained by Niki’s side until her passing in 2002. Her absence left an enormous void in his life until his own death in April 2022, almost twenty years later. We are honored to present a collection of works evidencing the close bond shared by Ted and Niki, many of which were gifts that Niki created for her good friend. The inscriptions throughout speak to their love for each other, their laughter and the fun they shared.
Niki de Saint Phalle 1930–2002
Niki de Saint Phalle was born Catherine-Marie-Agnès-Brandon Fal de Saint Phalle in France in 1930 to an upper-class Franco-American family. They lost their wealth during the Great Depression and moved to the United States in 1933. Saint Phalle attended the Brearley School in New York City until she was expelled for defacing statues on the school’s campus (she painted the fig leaves on nude figures an offending red). She was later sent to the Oldfields School in Maryland and graduated in 1947. After school, she modeled for Vogue and Life magazine, married a childhood friend when she was 18 and became a mother two years later.
In 1952 Saint Phalle and her husband moved back to Paris, where he studied music and she studied theater. The following year, after a period of intensive travel throughout Europe, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized; she took up painting to help with her recovery. In 1955 the family again moved, this time to Mallorca and Saint Phalle gave birth to her second child. While in Mallorca, she was exposed to the architecture of Antonio Gaudí, who would become a major influence for the imaginative style and ambitious scale of her work.
Saint Phalle returned to Paris in the late 1950s and she and her husband separated in 1960. She quickly established a studio, met artist Jean Tinguely who she’d have a long-term artistic and romantic relationship with and became part of the Nouveau Réalisme group that included Tinguely, Christo, Yves Klein, Arman and other artists working from the inspiration of Dadaism with an iconoclastic approach to artmaking. She became part of the artistic milieu, being friendly with Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí and held her first solo exhibition in 1961. During this time, she was creating her Tirs (Shoot) paintings, which were participatory performances where she and others took turns shooting at canvases covered with plaster balloons full of paint.
In the mid-1960s she began creating her most well-known and celebrated series of works, the Nanas, which were meditations on both the exalted and disparaged position women held in society (“nanas” in French is a slang term meaning “broads”). She was inspired to make these works after a visit with Clarice Rivers, the wife of the artist Larry Rivers who was a close friend and also pregnant at the time. Saint Phalle’s Nanas are expressive, exuberant, archetypal, cartoonish, engaging, fertile and imaginative. In the 1970s she began working on a more monumental scale, creating public sculptures, sculptural environments and buildings. In 1979, the foundations were laid for the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, which featured twenty-two sculptures over 14 acres and was completed in 1998. In 1982 she finished The Empress, an imposing sculptural building that she lived and worked in for the next ten years. Throughout the 1980s she returned to her Nanas and also began making kinetic sculptures in the 1990s as homage to Tinguely after his death in 1991.
Saint Phalle’s work combined mediums in new ways, blending and dismantling hierarchies between painting, sculpture, and performance. She also brought exuberance for the female body and spirit to the forefront of her work, when many of her contemporaries were working in a stark, modernist, masculine style. She died in 2002 due to complications stemming from the toxicity of the materials she used to create her singular and visionary body of work. She was 71.
Auction Results Niki de Saint Phalle
