Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nana sculptures are symbols of happy, liberated women, but the artist’s personal life was far from daisies and rainbows. She grew up in the 1940s on the Upper East Side—her mother was austere and violent, and her father sexually abused her. She married an aspiring musician, Harry Matthews, in 1949, and they had two children before launching into a long bohemian roam around Europe. Saint Phalle took an overdose of sleeping pills and was also stashing knives, razors, and scissors under her mattress; she ended up hospitalized. The couple separated in 1960, and Saint Phalle went on to collaborate with her future husband, the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely. This career-spanning exhibition explores the artist’s little-known dark side, but also her activism, her inventive projects, and her implacable drive to keep creating. —Elena Clavarino