Marisol’s Retrospective Resurrects Her Pop Art Reputation

Other major works from her critical Pop Art period that are part of the museum’s collection or on loan to the exhibition from private collectors and other institutions include Self-Portrait (1961-62), Baby Boy (1962-63), Baby Girl (1963), The Party (1965-66), and Kiss (1966). 

Born in 1930 to wealthy Venezuelan parents in Paris, Marisol Escobar (she later dropped her surname to divest herself from a patronage identity and to stand out from other artists) moved to New York in 1950 and started making experimental artwork. 

During this period, she hung out with the Abstract Expressionists at the Cedar Tavern and took art classes at the Art Students League, Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts, New School for Social Research, Brooklyn Museum Art School, and several independently teaching artists. She made drawings and sculptures about the family, the immigrant experience, displacement, and the nature of the self. 

Marisol presented sculptures in wood of carved animals and totemic figures and reliefs of family groups in her solo show in 1957 at New York’s celebrated Leo Castelli Gallery, which had debuted earlier in the year. Her carved wood sculpture Cat, with glass eyes, from that show is featured in today's retrospective.

Despite having a significant start, in 1958, Marisol abruptly moved to Rome and Paris. Returning to New York in 1960, she continued experimenting by adding found objects to her sculptural assemblages, which led to her inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark survey exhibition “The Art of Assemblage.”

Having left Leo Castelli Gallery in 1961 to reconsider the direction her work was taking, Marisol resurfaced from the studio for a May solo show at New York’s Stable Gallery, where her friend Andy Warhol would have his first one-person exhibition in November of that year. 

Besides the Albright-Knox’s acquisition of The Generals from that breakthrough show, the Museum of Modern Art and Rose Art Museum purchased works from the exhibition, and Life magazine included her on its prestigious 1962 “Red-Hot Hundred” list. 

A work that connects the artist to her Venezuelan roots and migration to the United States—beginning when she was a young child and continuing with her family—The Generals suggestively lampoons heroic equestrian monuments by coupling Simón Bolívar, who led Venezuela to independence from Spain, with George Washington. 

Portraying the two revolutionary leaders nestled on a wheeled wooden horse crafted from a repurposed barrel, the sculpture draws a comparison between the two father figures while the barrel, wheels, and a recorded musical march— which the body of the horse repeatedly plays— explore hemispheric tensions between the two nations, as well as Marisol’s displacement between her multiple homes.

Another significant sculpture in the museum’s collection, Baby Girl, acquired in 1964, responds to the motherly role that a woman was expected to fulfill, even if that wasn’t in her cards (Marisol never married, nor had children, and her sculpture The Wedding, from the same period, shows her marrying herself).

The sister piece to her giant sculptural Baby Boy (1962-63), a drawn and painted wood figure holding a doll with the artist’s face, Baby Girl presents an enormous, cutely-clad kid with a simpleminded look on its face, playing with a toy doll dressed like Barbie’s friend Midge, but with Marisol’s mug.

In 1966, the artist started showing with New York’s esteemed Sydney Janis Gallery, exhibiting The Party in her May solo show and Kiss in the October group show, “Erotic Art.” The Party presents an assemblage of 15 life-size figures with the artist’s face in various media standing before three domestic wall panels. 

Referencing Marisol’s reputation as a party girl, the carved wooden figures wear authentic and painted dresses and accessories to signify different social roles. For Kiss, Marisol created three casts of her face with a transparent polyester, with two of them kissing and the third puckered for a potential peck from the viewer— turning the entertaining, erotic piece into an invitation for a foursome. 

An earlier, critical portrayal of the artist, Self-Portrait, which was the first of many self-portraits by Marisol, multiplied and fragmented the self on one large wood-block body with seven carved heads, six carved legs, and one pair of breasts— all drawn and painted to capture her different personas. 

A line from the museum’s wall label for this mixed media piece amusingly reads, “Marisol once suggested in an interview that the last head was perhaps like Sunday, yawning with fatigue at week’s end.”

In 1968, Marisol represented Venezuela at the 34th Venice Biennale and was one of only four women among the 149 artists selected for that year’s Documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany. 

Taking some time off the following year, she traveled to Tahiti for several months to learn to scuba dive, which became a life-changing experience. After her epiphanous adventure, she described herself as “reborn— cleansed and purified.”

She brought her underwater experience to life with her first collaboration with a modern dance choreographer when she designed the sets and made rubber sturgeon props and costumes with fish fin shoes for Louis Falco’s dance performance at the New York City Center. 

In the 1970s, Marisol spent more time in Central and South America, while also continuously exhibiting her work in galleries and museums in the United States and Japan until the late 2000s, when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. 

Over the course of the last decades of her life, she made sculptures addressing ecological issues and drawings related to personal concerns, which are explored in greater depth in this timely and poignant exhibition.