Modernist Maker 021: Marisol
The Folk Pop Artist who Defied Glamour and Critiqued Culture
Continuing with our Pop Art theme, this month’s Modernist Maker is the Venezuelan-American sculptor, Marisol Escobar. Simply known by her first name, Marisol was a superstar of the 1960s before she seemed to fall into relative obscurity. But that isn’t the whole picture. Two recent retrospectives – Marisol: A Retrospective (Buffalo AKG Art Museum, ) and Marisol (Louisiana Museum) – have sought to answer the question: Who is Marisol? We continue the story below…
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Modernist Maker 021: Marisol
Folk you!
In 1973, The Village Voice reviewed the work of Marisol as a ‘neo-sophisticated appropriation of folk-art forms.’ She wrote back: ‘Folk you’.
That’s because Marisol’s engagement with folk traditions was deliberate. She studied American folk art and precolumbian sculpture closely, moving away from painting in the 1950s toward the carved wooden figures she became known for. But it was not by accident that Marisol’s works were misread as naïve, or that folk was used as a pejorative term. She knew this from the outset, responding: ‘If you call my work folk art it is only because you are prejudiced about my South American background.’
Born in 1930, María Sol Escobar grew up in a wealthy Venezuelan family, travelling between Paris, Caracas, and New York. But silence followed her. She stopped speaking for a number of years after her mother died by suicide; when she spoke again it was in low tones that would become her signature in later interviews, earning her the reputation as the Greta Garbo of the art world.
By the mid-1960s, her mystique piqued interest and she was marketed as a glamorous persona. But Marisol also saw that it was a way to ‘wipe me out’ and ignore the voice that was produced in her artwork. She said the art scene men ‘thought I was cute and spooky, but they didn’t take my art so seriously’.
Throughout her career, Marisol would navigate the pitfalls of glamour and fame.
Fame!
As an artist, Marisol was influenced by multiple traditions. She took courses at the Art Students League of New York, with Hans Hofmann, whose teaching about form, geometry, and spatial tension informed her sense of structure. The decorative style of another of her teachers, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, was another influence. With hints of Dada influence, she began to make large-scale sculptures that took direct aim at American society.
Her distinctive style prompted The Paris Review asked how she began her totemic work. Simply put she said: ‘In the beginning I drew on a piece of wood because I was going to carve it. And then I noticed that I didn’t have to carve it, because it looked as if it was carved already.’
Her large-scale figures were made out of a variety of materials including wood, plaster, metal, and fabric. Marisol would etch into the wood, giving the figures faces and personality, sometimes dressed in found clothes, hats, and wigs that she found in the trash.
Marisol’s fame was growing. Her sculptures were included in Tenth Street galleries – she had her first solo show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in November 1957, age 27, alongside Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Her work subsequently also caused a sensation at Stable Gallery and Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, as queues formed around blocks to get a glimpse of her sculptures.
Marisol was often found next to Andy Warhol at parties, and featured in his underground films like “The Kiss” (1962) and “13 Most Beautiful Women” (1963). She created a portrait of him in return.
As time passed, though, Marisol rejected the image that was being built up around her. She kept having to translate her vision to critics, to speak up, and refuse the label of glamorous outsider.
In ‘The Party’ (1965-1966), Marisol critiques the high society art scene she had become part of. These atomised, life-size sculptures find no connection as they close their eyes or turn their backs. In the right corner, a woman’s body has become a tray to serve from. Most of the figures have a version of Marisol’s face – whether cast or drawn or pasted on. The artist is not only lost in a crowd, but also, perhaps, becoming lost to herself.
There is one oft repeated anecdote that sums up Marisol’s feelings at this time.
At The Club in New York City – a spot where Abstract Expressionists often hung out – Marisol was asked to sit on a panel. She showed up in a white mask that covered her mouth. The men in the audience began to get antsy, yelling ‘Take off that goddam mask!’
Marisol loosened the ties and let the mask slip – only to reveal her face painted white underneath – in an imitation of the mask on top.
As artist, Al Hansen, recalled: ‘What a stunt! It’s something only she would think of, and it brought down the house.’
Assemblage attitude!
Marisol’s fame did, at times, obscure the experimental nature of her technique and the politicised nature of her work.
As John Canaday wrote that her sculptures were ‘clever as the very devil and catty as can be.’ Some of her humour can indeed be seen in caricatures of The Kennedy family and British Royal Family, or her Coca-Cola inspired cover for The Paris Review. A focus on pastiche and commentary earned her a place in the Pop Art pantheon.
But far from catty, Marisol was also interested in the reflection between self and society. Through her assemblage technique, she critiqued mid-century American attitudes to gender, immigration, and class.
One of her earlier works, ‘The Hungarians’ (1955), reflects on refugee status. The family stand on a rolling cart (the artist found the wheels on the street) suggesting the instability of the post-war immigrant experience.
In ‘Baby Girl’ (1963), a 6ft, larger-than-life child is made up of a giant box and carved head, a cowlick of wood forming the peak. The child’s face is hand drawn, almost lifelike, dressed in a white dress with a big bowtie drawn on and an appliqued frill of white fabric. On the child’s knee stands a smaller sculpture, modelled after an artist’s mannequin. The figure has Marisol’s face, suggesting that if the girl’s arms could reach out she might grab onto a creative future.
But it’s twin, ‘Baby Boy’ (1962-63), shows the giant child gripping a Marisol doll in his clutch. In creating a sculpture where innocence is writ large, Marisol turns it into something monstrous. She specifically said that the boy ‘represents America’.
Pop Art was seen as ironic and detached, but Marisol’s figures mobilise both satire and sincerity.
Obscurity!
As with many marginalised artists, there is the sense that after burning bright in the New York art scene for a few years, Marisol simply disappeared. During the 1960s–1970s, David Ebony argues she was ‘arguably the best-known female contemporary artist in the U.S., if not the world.’
Did her 15 minutes of fame fizzle?
When asked in 1964 how she would like her work to be seen by critics and the public, she seemed puzzled by the question. ‘I don’t care what they think,’ she said. Marisol chose to remove herself from the New York art scene, travelling to Rome and
As always, Marisol built her own identity. In the 1970s, leaving America and the art scene behind, Marisol went diving, finding a new inspiration in the deepest parts of the ocean. She found a love of scuba diving and began to make carved sculptures of fish – that often had her face. This sea-faring turn also fed into costume designs for experimental dance companies like The Louis Falco Dance Company’s performance of ‘Caviar’ (1970). Performers threw carved rubber fish that Marisol made at one another, pushing her work into new directions and finding new collaborators in different fields. For the Martha Graham Dance Company, she designed for ‘Ecuatorial’ – setting two factions against each other, Marisol’s designs sparked golden suns and swirling moons.
For the rest of her artistic life, Marisol also created powerful pieces of public sculpture, leaving her mark on the landscapes across Caracas and the USA. The American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial (1991) in Manhattan reflects once more Marisol’s interest in the sea – four men are stranded, calling out to the viewer. The sculpture was inspired by the SS Muskogee, a ship that ferried oil between Venezuela to the USA, which was sunk by the Germans in World War II on March 22, 1942. It weaves threads of identity, war, marginalisation – all long-held concerns for the artist.
Marisol also reflected on the legacy of modern artists. Her sculpture-portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe can be found at Sydney G. Walton Square in San Francisco, based on photographs Marisol took while visiting the 90-year-old O’Keefe in New Mexico. The poignant portrait uses the soft strokes in the wood to evoke a wrinkled face, a furrowed brow, and eyes staring steadily outwards. In her own later life, Marisol lived with Alzheimer’s Disease. When she died in 2016, age 86, her estate was left to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which continues to advocate for Marisol’s own legacy as a modern artist.
What critics once dismissed as ‘folk’ is what gives Marisol’s work its power. We find that she purposefully stepped away from the image as Pop Art’s princess, choosing to control her own voice and visibility. More important – her work asks questions still relevant today: what kind of making do we value, whose work do we recognise, and how can we make our mark?
With thanks to Buffalo AKG Art Museum for images and access to their press release.
Further reading:
Exhibition catalogue: Marisol: A Retrospective, Cathleen Chaffee (et al), 2023.
In Conversation: Voices in Contemporary Art: Marisol, Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Marisol artists’ statement for the Stable Gallery, 196-?, Archives of America.
Episode No. 665 of The Modern Art Notes Podcast, features curator Cathleen Chaffee on Marisol.
“Marisol and Warhol Take New York” Virtual Tour, The Andy Warhol Museum
Essay: Having a Coke with Marisol and Frank O’Hara by Delia Solomons
So lovely to see this! The AKG is my hometown art museum and I went to see the Marisol retrospective several times. Such an incredible body of work.