How does an artist go from being a smash hit to falling through the cracks of art history? Beginning in 1957 and through the 1960s, the artist Marisol (1930–2016) was the toast of the New York art scene, her figurative sculptures of roughly hewn wood and found objects admired by artists, critics, and the public alike. Her work was included in the pivotal “Art of Assemblage” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, and she represented Venezuela at the 1968 Venice Biennale. Yet by the 1970s her art was falling out of favor, as a fickle art world turned its attention to other styles and movements.
Now, however, Marisol is back in the spotlight. In her multifaceted practice, she was prescient in subtly addressing social and political issues, such as the immigrant experience, the environment, Native American rights, and social injustice, concerns that make her work newly relevant today. Fittingly, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum has organized a major retrospective of works from its substantial holdings, along with some significant loans. The exhibition is now at the Toledo Museum of Art, through June 2, after which it travels to Buffalo and then to Dallas. Below, we take a fresh look at Marisol’s life and her hard-to-classify art.
Early Life and Education
Maria Sol Escobar was born in 1930 in Paris to Venezuelan parents. The family moved a lot and traveled extensively, shuttling between Europe, the United States, and Venezuela as she grew up. This may have contributed to her lifelong wanderlust, often arising at seemingly inopportune moments.
Marisol’s life was turned upside down when she was 11, when her mother committed suicide. She responded by not speaking for many years, “except for what was absolutely necessary,” she once told an interviewer. As an adult, she would adopt the nickname her mother gave her, Marisol—a conflation of her first two names, as well as the Spanish words for “sea” and “sun.”
Her family moved to Los Angeles in 1946, when she was in high school. Her extensive art education began there, with evening classes at the Otis and Jepson art institutes. She spent 1949 in Paris studying at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts, briefly returned to Los Angeles, and then moved to New York in 1950. Like many artists at the time, she studied with Hans Hofmann—she once said he was the only teacher she ever learned from—as well as at the Art Students League, the New School for Social Research, and the Brooklyn Museum Art School.
She hung out at the Cedar Tavern, the storied Abstract Expressionist watering hole in Greenwich Village, where she met Willem de Kooning. They had a brief affair—at 50, he was twice her age—and would remain lifelong friends.
Gaining Notice in New York
In the early 1950s, Marisol saw a show of pre-Columbian art in New York and some carved figures while visiting her father in Mexico, both of which informed her work. Her first sculptures were terracotta and metal abstractions that resembled ritual objects. But she soon began creating the figurative wood sculptures that would make her famous.
Her work was included in a 1957 group show at Leo Castelli, along with work by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and others. Castelli gave her a solo show later that year that featured terracotta pieces, carved reliefs, and sculptural tableaux, including The Hungarians (1955), a family of three on a wheeled metal cart, a subtle observation of the immigrant experience.
Overwhelmed by the New York art world and media attention, Marisol abruptly left the city and spent 18 months in Rome. When she returned, in 1960, she began casting her own body parts—out of convenience, she said—to use in sculptures that also featured reclaimed wood, drawing, and found objects. She would often use her own countenance in sculptures, whether carved, drawn, photographed, or cast in plaster.
Dinner Date (1963), for example, comprises two blocky wood figures, both with Marisol’s face, seated at an actual table, one with the artist’s feet cast in plaster, the other with cowboy boots. An untitled work from 1960–63 has two Marisol faces lip-locked in a sensual kiss, a motif that would reappear in other sculptures and in drawings. Works such as these seem to suggest a woman who is on her own in the world, and just fine about it.
Marisol met Andy Warhol in 1962, and they became good friends. For some years she was the better-known of the two. She made a sculpture of him, and he included her in a number of his experimental films, most notably Kiss (1964) and Marisol—Stop Motion (1964), in which she is seen among many of her works.
She had several shows in the 1960s, two at Stable Gallery and then, in 1966, with Sidney Janis, who would represent her until 1993. They were enormously successful, with thousands of people lining up to see her work, and museums and collectors snapping up pieces.
Pop Art and Popular Culture
Marisol became associated with the emerging Pop movement, perhaps more for her subject matter than her style. Her portrait sculptures of public figures could be considered Pop, as could her tableaux like The Party (1965–66) and The Family (1962), which were snapshots of contemporary life. Her subjects included other artists—Warhol, Duchamp, Magritte, and Picasso among them—as well as politicians and public figures like the Kennedys, the British royal family, Lyndon B. Johnson, John Wayne, and Bishop Desmond Tutu.
Arguably, one of the most Pop works she made is Love (1962), a plaster cast of her face deep-throating a co*ke bottle (which skews more feminist and cynical of consumer culture than Pop). However, Marisol never fit neatly into the Pop category; her work doesn’t have its usual hallmarks: bright colors, slickness, a celebration of consumer culture. And she herself was indifferent about such labels.
Marisol continued to receive significant press coverage during this time, and not only in art magazines. She was enigmatic and elusive, and her quiet nature was often remarked upon, as was her beauty (observations that wouldn’t have been made in articles about male artists). The New York Times Magazine ran a profile by the critic Grace Glueck, who, like most writers who covered Marisol, gave almost as much space to her appearance and demeanor as to her artwork.
“The Marisol legend is nourished by her chic, bones-and-hollows face (elegantly Spanish with a dash of gypsy),” Glueck wrote, “. . . her mysterious reserve and faraway, whispery voice, toneless as a sleepwalker’s, but appealingly paced by a rich Spanish accent.” Gloria Steinem profiled Marisol for Glamour magazine in 1964 in an article subtitled “The Face Behind the Mask.” Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue also dedicated coverage to the artist.
The year 1968 was huge for Marisol. In addition to representing Venezuela at the Venice Biennale, she was one of only four women out of 150 artists included in the Documenta show in Kassel, West Germany. Among the sculptures shown in Venice was Mi Mama y Yo (1968), made of painted bronze in the style of her wood figures. In it, a young girl stands on a bench holding an openwork umbrella over her mother’s head in a futile protective gesture.
Once again, at a moment of enviable success, Marisol decamped from the art world and spent the rest of the year traveling in India and Thailand. After a short return to New York, she spent about six months in Tahiti, where she learned how to scuba dive. The experience of being deep underwater profoundly affected her and changed the focus of her work—and not always to the liking of critics and collectors.
Altered Status
By the time she returned to New York, the art world tide had shifted. Conceptual, nonobjective, performance, and land art were the prevailing trends. Her show at Sidney Janis in 1973 was marine-themed and included fish sculptures, some bearing the artist’s face. There is potent meaning in these seemingly benign works: The fish she chose had all been used as names for U.S. warships, such as USS Barracuda and USS Parrot. She likened the needlefish to ballistic missiles that, like the fish pursuing its prey, could rise from the water to hit their targets.
The show was roundly criticized. Hilton Kramer wrote in the New York Times: “This gifted artist, once so promising, looks more and more like a permanent casualty of the Pop movement.” The critic John Perreault wrote a stinging review of her new work in the Village Voice, saying it was a “neo-sophisticated appropriation of folk-art forms.” A draft letter she wrote in response was found in her archives. A zingy passage reads: “If you call my work folk art it is only because you are prejudiced about my South American background. Folk you.” It’s unknown whether she ever mailed the letter.
A lengthy interview appeared in the Feminist Art Journal in 1973. Reflecting on her diminished status in the art world, she said: “Now, maybe I’ve become paranoid, but it seems to me that in the sixties the men did not feel threatened by me. They thought I was cute and spooky, but
they didn’t take my art so seriously. Now, they take my art more seriously, but they don’t
like me so much.”
Later-Career Work
But the 1970s were also a fertile time for Marisol. She began collaborating with dancers and choreographers, Martha Graham in particular. Her first commission was for Louis Falco’s production of Caviar, for which she designed large fish props, costumes, and shoes that looked like fins.
Marisol undertook her first public art commission in 1968, a statue in Honolulu honoring Father Damien (1840–1889), a Belgian priest who ministered to exiled leprosy victims on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. She would complete 14 monuments over her career, most in the 1970s and ’80s, and many of them in Venezuela, including a statue of Simón Bolivar and his teacher Andrés Bello for the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research in Caracas.
Her 1991 monument for the American Merchant Mariners in Battery Park in Lower Manhattan is particularly poignant. Cast in bronze and sited on a short pier, it features three larger-than-life-size men atop a sinking ship. One figure reaches down into the water to rescue another, whose outstretched arm falls just short of the offered hand. The piece is based on a World War II photo taken after a Nazi U-boat torpedoed a Merchant Marine vessel. The Germans photographed their victims as they struggled to survive.
From the 1980s on, Marisol’s work largely concerned social justice issues, particularly those in Latin America and Cuba, and those affecting Native Americans in the United States. Reminiscent of her early work The Hungarians, the sculpture Horace Poolaw (1993) is based on a photo by Native photographer Horace Poolaw of his nephew in powwow regalia. Marisol placed a carved bust of the nephew on a wheeled cart, alluding to the forced migration of indigenous people. The piece is further politicized by the New York Police Department barricades she used to create the wheeled platform it sits on. The clash it implies, of the U.S. government against Natives and immigrants, still plays out today.
Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2006, Marisol died of pneumonia in 2016. She bequeathed her estate to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (then called the Albright-Knox Art Gallery). Among the reasons she gave was that it was the first museum to acquire her work (The Generals, 1961–62), in 1962.
