It’s hard not to laugh when you look at Marisol’s sculptures. Unapologetically funny, Marisol Escobar (1930–2016) possessed a deadpan wit in the tradition of Buster Keaton. Her art is droll, even mordant, but humor doesn’t undercut the more intimate, violent, or unsettling elements in work that touches on motherhood, gender, celebrity, social activism, environmental destruction, and political power. Marisol cast a cool eye, yet her sculptures are earthbound, approachable—and flat-out fun.
Creating objects in a variety of mediums, she had an abiding fascination with masks and placed a strong emphasis on drawing. Marisol is usually considered a maker of Pop art, but she’s as hard to classify as Frida Kahlo or Joseph Cornell. This is delightfully visible in “Marisol: A Retrospective,” a comprehensive exhibition that just opened at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and will tour. It restores Marisol’s deserved place in the pantheon of 20th-century artists.
At heart a portraitist, Marisol enjoyed a taste of art-world stardom in the 1960s. She was an It Girl on the New York party scene (memorably reconstructed in her 1966 assemblage, The Party), and her friend Andy Warhol called her “the first girl artist with glamour.” But Marisol mistrusted fame; after her first solo show, with Leo Castelli, in 1957, she left New York for almost two years. “You start getting publicity,” she said, “and then all of a sudden you lose everything you have.”
Born into a wealthy, peripatetic Venezuelan family, Marisol became acquainted with loss early; her mother took her own life when Marisol was 11. In response, she stopped speaking. “I was into my late twenties before I started to talk again,” Marisol later said. “Silence had become such a habit that I really had nothing to say to anybody.”
Introverted, diminutive, and beguiling, Marisol arrived in New York in 1950. She immersed herself in art classes (the legendary Hans Hofmann was one of her teachers), had a dalliance with Willem de Kooning, and in the mid-50s won attention for her wood sculptures—blocky and raw, heavily influenced by pre-Columbian and folk art. Marisol hit her stride in the 60s, producing macabre portraits of family life—including giant babies!—as well as unforgettable studies of Warhol, John Wayne, L.B.J., Charles de Gaulle, and herself. She could have continued in this vein indefinitely, but Marisol had no interest in becoming a brand.
Her work in the 1970s—including a series of fiercely strange, beautifully rendered sculptures of fish and sea creatures—met a stony critical reception. Yet if Marisol fell out of vogue, she never lost stature, curiosity, or interest in new idioms: she made sets for dance companies and did public installations. Her later sculptures retain the rawness and bite of her 50s oeuvre but are rendered with more command, as is clear in her sculptural portraits of Picasso, Desmond Tutu, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Marisol invites viewers to joyously lose themselves in the invention, surprise, and skill of her art.
“Marisol: A Retrospective” is on at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through January 21
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Alex Belth is the editor of Esquire Classic and curator of The Stacks Reader. He has worked in film editing for Ken Burns, Woody Allen, and the Coen brothers
