Jean Tinguely

Diagnoses

Vocation

Family

Swiss-born artist, a kinetic sculptor and pop artist. He attended school in Basel and became an apprentice to a store window decorator. With his first wife Eva Aeppli* whom he married on May 10, 1951, he moved to France in 1952. In May 1954 he had his first exhibition in Paris. He soon after met the woman who would become his second wife, Niki de Saint Phalle whom he married on July 13, 1971. While his first marriage yielded two children, his second bore none. On June 13,1973 Micheline Gygax gave birth to their son born out-of-wedlock. In 1992 he had another son out-of-wedlock, born to Milena Palakarkina. His sculptures are highly original, inventive, whimsical and mechanistic, dealing with movement, chance and chaos. Many involve electric motors and metal scraps. In March 1960 he exhibited a self-destructing machine in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The year prior (1959) he wrote in an essay. "Playing is art. So I am playing." He died in Bern, Switzerland on August 30, 1991 after complications from a stroke suffered two weeks earlier on August 18th. Link to Wikipedia biography