Niki de Saint Phalle’s monumental Tarot Garden, which opened in 1998 in Capalbio, Italy, is both at home and out of place in the countryside of Tuscany. On the one hand, her vividly colored figures, many of them covered with glittering, mirrored mosaics, reflect the brilliant blue sky and greenery that surround them, and thus become one with the landscape. On the other, their massive scale and amorphous, heavily delineated forms can seem anomalous within the otherwise low and rugged shrubbery of the region. Rising joyously out of the low hills like a Disneyland for artistic hippies, this “little corner of paradise,” as Saint Phalle first envisioned it, arose from her desire to give people “a metaphysical and meditative place… that will bring joy to the eyes and heart.”1 When I visited with my family five years ago, we spent days exploring the myriad interiors, and each tesserae-laden...

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