Marisol Rediscovered, Finally

Famous for her offbeat ’60s sculpture but long forgotten, the Latin Garbo gets a fresh look.

T his past weekend I wrote about the massive redo at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, now called the Buffalo AKG Museum. The new name has gangsta glam, and its new building is dazzling, but it’s sad to see the AKG’s venerable Beaux Arts pile dwarfed and marginalized. Still, it was good to see the collection and campus after a four-year construction project and always good to visit Buffalo.

Today I’m looking at Marisol, the AKG’s eye-popping, enlightening retrospective of the career of the sculptor Marisol Escobar (1930–2016). She was called “Marisol,” a childhood nickname playing on the Spanish word for sea and sun. I’ve always loved her weird, fresh, disruptive sculpture, tokenized as Pop Art but always much more. She defied categories and pushed boundaries, so simple minds among critics and art historians — and there are many — ignored her.

Marisol covers her 40-year career, starting with big, bulky, rough-hewn wooden sculptures from the 1960s, some portraits, and others figures dug from her copious imagination. In the ’70s, the artist turned underwater, to aquatic-ecology art. Later she made public monuments, some good, some bad. She designed sets and costumes for avant-garde dance companies. She made lots of erotic drawings. The exhibition is frank, exacting, and very different.

Marisol’s buddy, Andy Warhol, tagged her as “the Latin Garbo” for her long, enigmatic silences and smoldering looks. By the mid ’60s, she was a celebrity artist and fashion-mag cover girl while Warhol was a celebrity artist and pointy-haired freak and the lesser of the two artists. She was Venezuelan by birth and upbringing, though I consider her an American artist. And, yes, she rarely spoke, and, in fact, was a virtual mute from age eleven, when her mother killed herself, until well into her twenties. Then, strange to say, she became a New York socialite.

Her well-to-do family was peripatetic. Marisol was born in Paris but lived in Caracas, Los Angeles, Rome, and New York, sometimes in art school but always looking and absorbing. Folk art, Pre-Columbian pottery, Picasso, Romanesque sculpture, Miro, de Kooning, Afro Basaldella, and Hans Hofmann each grabbed her eye, but “influenced” or “inspired” aren’t the right terms. Her work is its own thing.

Key works in the introductory gallery cue us to Marisol’s approach and subjects. She did lots of self-portraits, usually cryptic, such as the multi-head sculpture from around 1962 on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. All seven heads are either casts from the artist’s face or a likeness carved into the wood. Legs are carved and separate. The work is charming, spooky, and enigmatic. A sculpture of “John,” that is Pope John XXIII from 1961, is nearby. He’s wearing a barrel.

Some of Marisol’s drawings are nearby. One, The Famous Laugh Taught from the Cradle, from the late ’50s, depicts three adults with flashy, fake smiles in a neon palette. With My Tongue in My Cheek is part-drawing, depicting two women’s heads side by side with attenuated fingers surrounding the heads and a part-plaster cast of Marisol’s nose and cheeks. Others are dreamy doodles, one of a disembodied mouth with a ghoulish grin.

“Weird,” you say? There is and isn’t method to Marisol’s madness. She’s famous as a sculptor, but Marisol was a prolific, startlingly good sketcher, photographer, and magazine-clipper. There’s lots of flat art on the walls and in cases, so the overall look of the galleries is dense. The viewer needs to work.

That’s good. It’s a serious exhibition done by the museum’s first-rate curators. A comprehensive Marisol show was overdue, but the AKG is doing it because the museum inherited her estate when she died. Then the Albright-Knox, the museum bought her work starting in the ’60s. The relationship lasted. Marisol never married and had no children. The AKG now owns her archive, studio contents, sketchbooks, and lots of sculptures. It’s giving us a deep-dive look at an artist dismissed as a Warhol crony and Pop sensation who, like Warhol, ran only on fumes after, say, 1970. The museum is showing us some very good art but also an excavation project.

Some of her portrait sculptures have fun touches and are endearing. A portrait sculpture of Warhol from 1962 starts as a chair-shaped block of wood on which Marisol paints parts of Warhol on each side of the block. At the bottom of the sculpture, she tucks his shoes in a carved-out niche. A full-length sculpture of Lyndon Johnson from 1967 depicts tiny heads of Lady Bird and their two daughters in the palm of his hand. To the very limited extent that LBJ can look sweet, this is sweet. Another life-size sculpture, done in 1977, portrays Georgia O’Keeffe with her two dogs.

Her figures of children, though, discommode and scare. Her Babies — boys and girls and from the early ’60s — look like bulbous monsters, cute but terrifying, born evil, and so unsettling that sometimes Marisol had to leave her own studio to refresh and recoup.

There are plenty of ways to read them. That children are born with a touch of evil is a Middle Ages concept. Do these toddlers suffer from radiation poisoning from nuke tests? Marisol said she was sick of reporters pestering her about when she planned to marry and have kids, so she sculpted sci-fi Gerber Babies as her way to say “never.” Her Family, from 1963, depicts a picture-perfect group of a husband and wife, two children walking by their sides, and twins in a crib. Mom’s smile is radiant, but her hat covers her eyes. Dad is a dead-eyed block.

Marisol appeared in lots of women’s magazines, often in front-cover stories. She was photogenic and, coming from South America, topical at a time when revolutions, juntas, a missile crisis, and Castro chic were newsy. She was also a rarity as a woman sculptor, but she did have peers in Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, and Niki de Saint Phalle. Her tags as the “Latin Garbo” and “the first girl artist with glamour,” another Warhol sobriquet, distinguished her, as did her part in the social circles of not only Warhol but also Lee Radziwill, Alex Katz, and Henry Geldzahler.

The Party, made in 1965 and 1966, isn’t exactly the star of Marisol, but it’s her most complicated work, with 15 life-size figures, all variations of Marisol, three wall panels, mirrors, a TV set, and lots of accessories. Katz’s Cocktail Party, an eight-footer, was painted at the same time, but his take is suave and confident. Marisol’s oozes unease. The artist said she went to lots of parties but always felt alone, and, remember, she was mostly mute for a dozen years. “I never wanted to be part of society,” Marisol said years later. “I’ve always had a horror of the schematic, of conventional behavior.”

Indeed. The Party is a fascinating object, stretching 20 feet, with Marisol in a range of party dresses, a head on pedestals, or a head on a bar. Each face is a different form of detachment and disguise. There’s no set arrangement. Marisol’s work is emphatically frontal, but, in her instructions on how The Party was to be installed, she allowed for some figures to be shifted diagonally but none were to relate to each other. The Toledo Museum of Art owns the work, buying it in 2005 in what has to have been a collecting coup. Marisol was still alive, dementia-ridden, and, for the most part, a castaway artist, but she was bound for a comeback.

Marisol’s high point, at least in fame, was the ’60s, but in the ’70s she literally went underwater, becoming an environmental artist. She got off the party circuit and started to disappear from the art scene. She became a deep-sea diver, spending, she thought, a year of the decade in the ocean depths. As America went to the Moon, she went Jules Verne, with camera on hand. Her fish sculptures, also in wood, are sleek, suggesting they’re wet, cool, and minimalist. These and her underwater photographs are good, not great, but very different, if we need to be reminded that she dances to the beat of her own drummer, this time in the manner of Jacques Cousteau.

From the ’70s into the ’90s, Marisol did lots of outdoor sculpture commissions, many in Venezuela. Photographs and drawings might not do them justice, but, done in bronze, they look like Botero sculptures. In the late ’80s, she did the American Merchant Mariners’ Memorial in Battery Park in Manhattan. It changes with the tides and isn’t bad, but it’s not her scale or her medium. Her genius is on a human scale, with wood, and in multimedia based on wood. Heroism isn’t in her skill set.

Marisol is a provocative, thorough, gripping exhibition. The tour’s brilliant. It has already traveled to Toledo and Montreal and, after Buffalo, will head to Dallas. That’s lots of good exposure for Marisol. The catalogue is meaty, with solid essays, a readable chronology, and a comprehensive bibliography. Marisol was a hot tamale, critic-wise, in the ’60s, but she was lumped with other Pop artists, all men who riffed on cartoons and other forms of mass media and did irony and cynicism best.

I look at her as a pioneer feminist artist dealing with women’s sexuality, subjectivity, the primacy of the carefully crafted, and family. One of the most touching works in the exhibition is Dinner Date, from 1963, owned by Yale. It shows two chair-shaped sculptures, both of Marisol, arranged by a small table as if they are a couple on a date. It’s about loneliness but not lonesomeness. “If you’ve learned to live with yourself,” Marisol said, “you’ve achieved something.” Making our way through life is an experience all of us share, in one way or another. That’s the golden thread of a theme running through Marisol’s art, making it universal, timeless, and classic. Welcome back, Marisol!