Jill Johnston (1929–2010)

Even though she said it would never be done in her lifetime, Niki de Saint Phalle's Tarot Garden opened to the public in 1998, the same year a visitor center designed by architect Mario Botta was completed and four years before the French-American artist would die. This year marks its inclusion in my book "100 Years, 100 Landscape Designs," between Robert Irwin's Central Garden from 1997 and the Botanical Garden of Barcelona from 1999. To learn more about the famous park, I picked up this book — a companion to a 1997 exhibition in Italy — after coming across it at a used bookstore. It has plenty of photographs, sketches by Nike de Saint Phalle, essays by artists, critics, and Mario Botta, as well as interviews with people who worked on the realization of the huge, accessible sculptures. The last were particularly valuable, since they detailed just how the artist's distinctive figures were realized at such a scale, in a garden, and for perpetuity. It's one of the places in "100 Years, 100 Landscape Designs" that I've yet to see in person, though thumbing through this book again renews my interest in doing so someday soon.… (meer)