Marisol, “The Party,” 1965–1966, installation at Toledo Museum of Art, fifteen figures, three wall panels, painted and carved wood, mirrors, plastic, television set, clothes, shoes, glasses and other accessories. Toledo Museum of Art Collection/Photo: K.A. Letts
“Marisol: The Forgotten Star of Pop Art”—so reads the title of the 2016 Guardian obituary of the boundary-bending artist and sometimes muse of Andy Warhol, Maria Sol Escobar, or Marisol, as she was known throughout her creative career. A significant artist of the late twentieth century and extending into the twenty-first, she enjoyed a period of intense celebrity in the 1960s followed by decades of critical neglect.
In 2014, a reassessment of her work began with a traveling exhibition organized by Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, and continues in 2024 with “Marisol: A Retrospective,” at the Toledo Museum of Art. Those who are only slightly familiar with Marisol’s work from a few pieces in museums will be astonished by the richness and depth—and the sheer quantity of work—on display in this comprehensive re-evaluation.
Marisol, “Baby Girl,” 1963, wood and mixed media, 74” x 35” x 47” Buffalo AKG Museum, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1964 (K1964:8). Estate of Marisol/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Photo: Brenda Bieger, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
The exhibition, curated by the Buffalo AKG Museum, to whom the artist bequeathed her estate, details the artist’s career from her early success, following her into relative obscurity and back. Born in Paris in 1930, Marisol spent her early childhood traveling between the United States and South America with her upper-class Venezuelan family. When the suicide of Marisol’s mother in 1941 introduced trauma into her life, she responded by observing a prolonged period of silence, a habit of reticence she practiced throughout her life. Her sphinxlike demeanor both intrigued and alienated her audience and may have contributed to later critical neglect of her work.
Marisol’s sculptures were noticed and shown by Leo Castelli in New York City when she was included in a group show with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in 1957. This was followed by a solo exhibition of her work later that year. Spooked by the sudden attention, the artist left for Rome in 1957 and stayed away for almost two years, a pattern of alternating visibility and absence that repeated itself several times during her career.
Marisol, “Mi Mama y Yo,” 1968, wood and mixed media, 74” x 35” x 47”, Buffalo AKG Museum, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1964 (K1964:8). Estate of Marisol/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/Photo: Brenda Bieger, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Marisol both benefited from and was limited by her reputation as a fashion plate/party girl. In characteristically back-handed fashion, Andy Warhol praised her as “the first girl artist with ‘glamour.’” She appeared in two of Warhol’s films, “Kiss” and “Marisol—Stop Motion” and was often photographed for Harper’s Bazaar, the New York Times Magazine, Glamour and Vogue.
The large hall at the center of the exhibition features hundreds of Marisol’s sculptures, along with extensive contemporaneous ephemera, and shows Marisol’s artworks from the 1960s, at the most critically successful period of her career. By the end of that decade, she had developed a signature style that incorporated found objects, flat planes of figurative painting and casts of body parts, (often her own) into compelling individual sculptures and installations. Uniquely personal in formal terms, Marisol’s output from this period was also often political. Themes of resistance to the Vietnam War and nuclear proliferation figured prominently in many of the works, such as “Couple #2,” “The Generals” and “LBJ.” Pope John XXIII comes in for some deft political satire in her 1961 sculpture of the religious figure riding a roughly knocked-together wooden hobby horse with Marisol’s face, a perfect encapsulation of the Roman Catholic church’s patriarchy.
Marisol, “The Fishman” (left), 1973, wood, plaster, paint acrylic, and glass eyes, 68.25″ x 28″ x 33.25″. Installation at Toledo Museum of Art/Photo: K.A. Letts
Though the high point of Marisol’s early career pre-dated the second-wave feminism of the 1970s, and she never defined herself as a “feminist” artist, her work projects an unmistakably female identity. Many of her sculptures detail familial relationships and comment on the place of women, and mothers particularly, within them. In the monstrous sculptures “Baby Boy” and “Baby Girl,” Marisol uses scale to depict outsize pressures on women to fulfill their societal roles. The enormous infants clutch tiny doll-like maternal figures, each with Marisol’s face. This may have been her pointed response to frequent and annoying questions by journalists about her prospects for marriage and family. Her two-figure artwork “Mi Mama y Yo” clearly refers to her mother, whose death Marisol described as “the end of family life.”
“The Party,” one of the most iconic of Marisol’s works from this period (and coincidentally part of the permanent collection at the Toledo Museum of Art) takes on the broader theme of the alienation of upper-class women in mid-century America. Fifteen elegantly dressed figures, most of them with Marisol’s face, mingle but fail to connect in this cocktail-party setting.
Marisol, “John, Washington and Emily Roebling Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge for the First Time,” 1989, wood, stain, graphite, paint, plaster. Overall: 103 7/8” x 74 7/8” x 48”. Collection Buffalo AKG Museum, Bequest of Marisol/Photo: K.A. Letts
At the height of her fame in 1968, Marisol once again abandoned the New York scene, this time for India, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand. Later, in Tahiti, she took up scuba diving and spent several years creating a new body of work centered around environmental and aquatic themes. The artworks in the penultimate gallery at the museum are devoted to these misunderstood images and objects and seem prescient to contemporary and environmentally aware sensibilities. Though Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” had been published in 1962, and the first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, the destructive relationship of humans to the planet hadn’t yet fully registered with the cultural elite. The carved-wood sculptures of fish/human hybrids and the films she made and then exhibited in 1973 met with bafflement and critical rejection. The new work also had a surrealist edge that was at odds with art fashions of the time favoring conceptual art and abstraction. And in ways that seem perplexing now, Marisol was criticized for the resemblance of her work to “folk art.”
As the New York art scene became less hospitable, Marisol found herself reclaimed as a Venezuelan artist. Public commissions in the United States and Venezuela formed a large part of her later work and are well represented in the final gallery of the retrospective. Her often-controversial commissions featured historical and cultural figures such as the revolutionary Simón Bolívar, Father Damien (a Belgian-born missionary to lepers in Hawaii), Mark Twain, Georgia O’Keeffe (and her dogs), the Roebling family of Brooklyn Bridge fame and Queen Isabella.
From early success to later obscurity, and now to a critical reassessment that places her back in the cultural mainstream, Marisol’s reputation has taken a long-delayed, but well-deserved step toward rehabilitation. Her resolute insistence upon exploring her world through the lens of self-examination is—at last—rewarded. For those who can make it to Toledo this summer, this extraordinary survey of a remarkable artist’s life is well worth the trip.
“Marisol: A Retrospective” is on view at Toledo Museum of Art, 2445 Monroe Street, Toledo, Ohio, through June 2.
