February 17th: Nicole Rudick in Conversation with Ruth Franklin

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Nicole Rudick will discuss her new book What is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle with Ruth Franklin.

The live event will stream directly on this page on Thursday, February 17th at 7 pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards. During the broadcast, please email your questions to Evan@192Books.com.

Nicole Rudick —What is Now Known Was Once Only Imagined: An (Auto)biography of Niki de Saint Phalle (Published by Siglio Press, 2022)

A biography by Nicole Rudick told in Saint Phalle’s own words, assembled from rare and unseen materials.

Known best for her exuberant, often large-scale sculptural works that celebrate the abundance and complexity of female desire, imagination and creativity, Niki de Saint Phalle viewed making art as a ritual, a performance—a process connecting life to art. This unconventional, illuminated biography, told in the first person in Saint Phalle’s voice and her own hand, dilates large and small moments in Saint Phalle’s life which she sometimes reveals with great candor, at other times carefully unwinding her secrets. Nicole Rudick, in a kind of collaboration with the artist, has assembled a gorgeous and detailed mosaic of Saint Phalle’s visual and textual works from a trove of paintings, drawings, sketches and writings, many previously unpublished or long unavailable, that trace her mistakes and successes, her passions and her radical sense of joy. Saint Phalle’s invocation—her “bringing to life”—writes Rudick, “is an apt summation of the overlap of Saint Phalle’s life and art: both a bringing into existence and a bringing to bear. These are visions from the frontiers of consciousness.”

Photo: Andrew Fladeboe

Nicole Rudick is a critic and an editor. Her writing on art, literature, and comics has been published in the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum, and elsewhere. She was managing editor of The Paris Review for nearly a decade. She is the editor of a new edition of Gary Panter’s legendary comic Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise (New York Review Comics, 2021).

Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism.