Philip Key looks at a major retrospective of the work of controversial French artist Niki de Saint Phalle

NIKI de SAINT PHALLE was one of the more unusual artists of the late 20th-century. French-born, she became a model in her teens, married an American writer, and was encouraged to take up painting as a form of therapy after suffering dark moods.

She was creating art until her death in 2002, at the age of 71, leaving behind a bewildering collection of paintings, sculptures and her own sculpture garden.

But was the self-taught artist a lightweight or an important figure in 20th-century art?

The debate continues, although the art world has been coming round to the latter opinion, one underlined by a major retrospective which opens at Tate Liverpool today.

Gallery director Christoph Grunenberg admits her standing is higher in Continental Europe, where she spent most of her life, rather than Britain.

But he was keen to stage a show that reflected art in the late 20th century to complement the forth- coming exhibition of early 20th- century art by Austrian Gustav Klimt, due to open in late May.

Niki de Saint Phalle certainly epitomises the sense of fun and discovery that art went through in the last decades of the century.

She was born in 1930, but when her banker father, Andre-Marie, went bust, the family relocated to the United States. She was just three.

She later changed her unwieldy first name, Catherine-Marie-Agnes, to plain Niki, and by the time she was 16 her classic good looks – high-cheekboned, slim waist – were gaining her work as a fashion model in publications such as Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Elle magazines. In 1949, she even made the cover of Time in a jewelled necklace, three-quarter length gloves and a classic dress. The caption alongside promised: “How to Make Two Outfits Out of One”.

She could have gone in search of the American Dream, but Niki was a rebel. At the age of 18, she eloped with author and family friend Harry Mathews.

They later moved to Paris, where Niki had a nervous breakdown and was encouraged to paint and create art in her self-taught style. She was, she decided, an artist, mixing with artists in Paris.

She moved to Majorca, visited Madrid and Barcelona, and came under the influence of Gaudi and had her first exhibition in Switzerland in 1956. She had already met artist Jean Tinguely and his wife, and they worked together so closely that within a few years both would divorce their partners and marry.

But what of the art? The Tate exhibition follows her career in chronological order, from the rather naive Family Portrait of 1954, to the large Tarot sculpture, The Devil, of 1988, and lithographs still being created in the late 1990s.

It reveals an often troubled mind – curator Kyla McDonald points out some of her work contained violent objects like knives and scissors – coupled with a huge sense of fun in some of her colourful paintings, and sculptures of the large women she named Nanas (Nana is the French word for Dame).

Perhaps she remains best-known for her shooting paintings of the early 1960s, paintings that really began with Portrait of My Lover, a curious piece in which a man’s head was substituted with a dartboard. Visitors to the gallery at the time were invited to throw darts, although today the piece is under Perspex, the darts still firmly embedded.

Kyla, who has helped curate the show for the Tate, said the shooting paintings were all shot with a .22 rifle.

Paint containers were hung over paintings or reliefs, while Niki herself and sometimes fellow artists like Robert Rauschenberg took pot-shots. Often, the shootings were staged as part of a gallery event, something today’s Health and Safety officials would probably take a dim view of. It sounds daft, but the results were quite spectacular.

Colourful paint drips down fairly large works, among them Kennedy-Kruschev from 1962 which features a huge paint and wire mesh figure with two heads, those of the two political leaders.