“Marisol and Warhol Take New York” is the tallyho title of an exhibition that re-unites the two kindred weirdo spirits who became, for a brief Camelot spell, the First Couple of Pop Art. Their trajectories then diverged, and therein lies the story. Marisol Escobar, a Venezuelan born in Paris and raised in affluence, and Andy Warhol, a spindly refugee from the scruffy outskirts of Pittsburgh, first met in 1962 and immediately serenaded each other through their art. Marisol made a wooden sculpture of Andy, a cast of her hands resting demurely in his lap; Warhol in turn filmed her for a few early experimental shorts and enshrined her in one of his famous screen tests, where, unlike so many of the other fidgets in the series, she barely blinked.
That was part of her mystique. Like the Velvet Underground enchantress Nico, Marisol possessed the cheekbones and opaque hauteur of a Garbo-esque siren. If Warhol was known for his preppy, gee-whiz vocabulary, which seldom ventured far from his trademark “Wow,” Marisol often disposed of language altogether, enclosing herself in a cocoon of silence that bewitched many, annoyed others.
