The site is artist Niki de Saint Phalles career-defining masterpiece.
Flashes of blue and green and white and red caught my eye, the sun glinting off mirrored tiles.
I held my breath as we made our way up the drive.
Inside The Emperor, which is lined in mirrored tiles.Valerio Mei/Shutterstock
Perhaps for this reason the iconography of the tarot deck has long held an allure for artists.
If life is a game of cards, she wrote, we are born without knowing the rules.
Yet we must play our hand.
The Magician and the High Priestess, part of Niki de Saint Phalle’s tarot garden.Peter Granser
Still others were covered in tiny mirrors, which reflect and fracture the sky.
At the time of her death in 2002, she was planning a maze.
The garden had been, she wrote, my husband, my love, my everything.
Niki de Saint Phalle poses on her then-unfinished sculpture, Strength, in 1985.Giulio Pietromarchi
But she also worked freely from her imagination.
Monsters and prehistoric creatures appear as symbols of rebirth, of primeval force.
They are intended to be touched, climbed on, and otherwise engaged with.
He was exercising his own form of freedom; Saint Phalle no doubt would have approved.
Ben stayed with him and I climbed up into the park alone.
His wings are tiled with fiery red, yellow, and orange.
Her right hand is raisedwas she going to fight the dragon, or pet him?
It might contain the key to all mythologies, I thought, if it could only be deciphered.
It had not been a terrible idea to bring him to this place.
One of the statues enormous breasts fits an entire kitchen; the other a bedroom.
There are portholes in the nipples that allow you to look out over the garden and the countryside beyond.
Almost everything inside is completely covered in fragments of mirror, even the dishwasher.
Their readings take the form of their perambulations.
My own journey through the cards was shaped partly by journalistic duty, partly by familial responsibility.
