Marisol Escobar (May 22, 1930 – April 30, 2016), otherwise known simply as Marisol, was a Venezuelan-American sculptor born in Paris, who lived and worked in New York City. She became world-famous in the mid-1960s, but lapsed into relative obscurity within a decade. The largest retrospective of Marisol's artwork, Marisol: A Retrospective has been organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and curated by Cathleen Chaffee for these museums: the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (October 7, 2023 – January 21, 2024), the Toledo Museum of Art (March–June 2024), the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (July 12, 2024 - January 6, 2025), and the Dallas Museum of Art (February 23–July 6, 2025).

Although it was supplemented by loans from international museums and private collections, the exhibition drew largely on artwork and archival material Marisol left to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum as a bequest upon her death.

Early life and education

María Sol Escobar was born on May 22, 1930, to Venezuelan parents in Paris, France. She was preceded by an elder brother, Gustavo. The tragedy, followed by her father shipping Marisol off to boarding school in Long Island, New York, for one year, affected her very deeply.

After Josefina's death and Marisol's exit from the Long Island boarding school, the family traveled between New York and Caracas, Venezuela. She then returned to the United States and, in 1950, moved to New York to begin her studies there. She took classes at the Art Students League of New York, at the New School for Social Research, and she was a student of artist Hans Hofmann at his schools in New York and Provincetown.

Early career

thumb|The Large Family Group (1957), [[National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.]]

After experimenting with terracotta, bronze, and wood sculptures inspired by Pre-Columbian sculpture and American Folk Art in the 1950s, Marisol left New York for Rome in 1957, where she stayed for more than a year. On her return, Marisol quickly became associated with the pop art movement as it emerged in the 1960s, enhancing her recognition and popularity. By 1961-62 she was concentrating her work on three-dimensional portraits and representations of society types, using inspiration "found in photographs or gleaned from personal memories". Marisol took inspiration from found objects, such as a piece of wood that became her Mona Lisa sculpture, and an old couch that became The Visit.

She became a friend of Andy Warhol in the early 1960s; she made a sculptural portrait of him, and he invited her to appear in several of his early films, including The Kiss (1963) and 13 Most Beautiful Girls (1964).

Artistic practice

During the Postwar period, there was a return of traditional values that reinstated social roles, conforming race and gender within the public sphere. According to Holly Williams, Marisol's sculptural works toyed with the prescribed social roles and restraints faced by women during this period through her depiction of the complexities of femininity as a perceived truth. Marisol's practice demonstrated a dynamic combination of folk art, dada, and surrealism – ultimately illustrating a keen psychological insight on contemporary life.

By displaying the essential aspects of femininity within an assemblage of makeshift construction, Marisol was able to comment on the social construct of "woman" as an unstable entity. Using an assemblage of plaster casts, wooden blocks, woodcarving, drawings, photography, paint, and pieces of contemporary clothing, Marisol effectively recognized their physical discontinuities. Through a crude combination of materials, Marisol symbolized the artist's denial of any consistent existence of "essential" femininity.

Using a feminist technique, Marisol disrupted the patriarchal values of society through forms of mimicry. Through a parody of women, fashion, and television, she attempted to ignite social change. This work, among others, represented a satiric critical response on the guises of fabricated femininity by deliberately assuming the role of "femininity" in order to change its oppressive nature. This strategy was employed as a self-critique, but also identified herself clearly as a woman who faced prejudices within the current circumstances.

Like many other pop artists, Marisol cropped, enlarged, reframed, and replicated her subject matter from contemporary pop culture and everyday life in order to focus on their discontinuities. Paying attention to specific aspects of an image and/or the ideas outside of their original context, allowed for a thorough understanding of messages meant to be transparent. Through her mimetic approach, the notion of a 'woman' was broken down into individual signifiers in order to visually reassemble the irregularities of the representational parts. By producing these symbols through conflicting materials, she disassociated "woman" as an obvious entity and presented her rather as a product of a series of symbolic parts. Although the dresses, shoes, gloves, and jewelry appear to be genuine at first, they are actually inexpensive imitations of presumably precious consumer goods. By juxtaposing different signifiers of femininity, Marisol explained the way in which "femininity" is culturally produced. The sculptures were based on existing photographs, which were interpreted by the artist and transformed into a new material format. De Gaulle's features were emphasized in order to create a caricature, by exaggerating his jowl, distancing his eyes, narrowing his mouth, and skewing his tie. Marisol produced satiric social commentaries in concern to gender and race, which being a woman of color is a circumstance she lives in.

Visage

Within several of her sculptures, Marisol incorporated her own visage. Sculptures that included her face were either in the form of plaster casts, photographs, or drawings during the 60s in the height of the Pop art movement, such as The Party (1965-1966), Women and Dog (1964), and Baby Boy (1962-1963). In response to accusations of being self-centered, Marisol responded that the use of her own face was intended to be more efficient. With the insertion of her face, Marisol simultaneously criticized and acknowledged the struggles women go through in living under patriarchal views in society. One of her best-known works from this period is The Party, a life-size group installation of figures at the Toledo Museum of Art. All the figures, gathered together in various guises of the social elite, sport Marisol's face. Marisol dropped her family surname of Escobar in order to divest herself of a patrilineal identity and to "stand out from the crowd". He suggests a strong shared influence from both the Ashcan School and the form of Comics in general. He explains that "Marisol inherited some of the features of this tradition by way of her training under Howard Warshaw and Yasuo Kaiyoshi." Boimes also notes the profound effect that Comic book art had on the Pop Artists and Marisol herself, not to mention that the origins of the comic strip are deeply intertwined with the Ashcan School, explaining that, "The pioneers associated with the Ashcan School sprang from the same roots as pioneer cartoonists," and that, "almost all began their careers as cartoonists."

Marisol drifted through many artistic movements. "Not Pop, Not Op, It's Marisol!" was the way Grace Glueck titled her article in The New York Times in 1965: The work was acquired by Time, and is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. Curator Wendy Wick Reaves said that Escobar is "always using humor and wit to unsettle us, to take all of our expectations of what a sculptor should be and what a portrait should be and messing with them. So when she's asked why there are two pipes, she says, 'Well, Hugh Hefner has too much of everything.'"

Marisol's diversity, unique eye and character set her apart from any one school of thought. She has often included portraits of public figures, family members and friends in her sculpture. In one exhibit, "Marisol Escobar's The Kennedys criticized the larger-than-life image of the family" (Walsh, 8). In 1982-1984, her respect for Leonardo da Vinci led her to make a life-sized sculptural representation of herself contemplating her full-sized tableau of The Last Supper. She also did a work based on da Vinci's The Virgin with St. Anne.

In Pop art, the role of a "woman" was consistently referred to as either mother or seductress and rarely presented in terms of a female perspective. This portrayal, set within Pop art, was predominately determined by male artists, who commonly portrayed women as commoditized sex objects. Marisol was one of the few who embraced her gender identity. Critical evaluation of Marisol's practice concluded that her feminine view was a reason to separate her from other Pop artists, as she offered sentimental satire rather than a deadpan attitude.

Art critics, such as Lucy Lippard, began to recognize Marisol in terms of Pop art in 1965. At this time, her sculpture was recognized relative to certain pop objectives. Yet, Lippard primarily spoke of the ways in which Marisol's work differentiated from the intentions of Pop figureheads Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, and Donald Judd. Simultaneously, by including her personal presence through photographs and molds, the artist illustrated a self-critique in connection to the human circumstances relevant to all living the "American dream". Marisol depicted the human vulnerability that was common to all subjects within a feminist critique and differentiated from the controlling male viewpoint of her Pop art associates. She was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978.

Marisol created a series of wood sculptures in the 1990s, mostly depicting Native Americans. Two exhibits of these works were not well received and she felt misunderstood.

In 2004, Marisol's work was featured in "MoMA at El Museo", an exhibition of Latin American artists held at the Museum of Modern Art. Marisol's work has attracted increased interest, including a major retrospective in 2014 at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, Tennessee, which also became her first solo show in New York City, at Museo del Barrio.

Last years

Escobar last lived in the TriBeCa district of New York City, and was in frail health towards the end of her life.

In April 2017, it was announced that Marisol's entire estate had been left to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York now renamed the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

In 2021 the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh presented Marisol and Warhol Take New York, an exhibition that posited connections between the rising artistic careers of Marisol and Andy Warhol, who were friends throughout their lives. The exhibition traveled to Pérez Art Museum Miami. An accompanying catalogue was published by the Warhol Museum and PAMM on the occasion of the exhibition.

Collections

In addition to the largest collection of her work in the world at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, her work is included in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Currier Museum of Art, ICA Boston, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, and the Museum of Modern Art, among many others.

Awards

  • 2016 Paez Medal of Art from VAEA (granted while alive, bestowed post mortem)

See also

  • National Prize of Plastic Arts of Venezuela
  • Niki de Saint Phalle

References

Works cited

  • Avis Berman, "A Bold and Incisive Way of Portraying Movers and Shakers." Smithsonian, February 14, 1984: pp. 14–16.
  • De Lamater, Peg. "Marisol's Public and Private De Gaulle." American Art, vol. 10, no. 1, 1996, pp. 91–93.
  • Diehl, Carol. "Eye Of The Heart." Art In America 96.3 (2008): 158-181. Academic Search Complete. Web. 29 Oct. 2016
  • Dreishpoon, Douglas. "Marisol Portrait Sculpture." Art Journal, vol. 50, no. 4, 1991, pp. 94–96.
  • "Escobar, Marisol." The Hutchinson Encyclopedia. September 22, 2003
  • Gardner, Paul "Who is Marisol?" ARTnews 88 May 1989: pp. 12–15.
  • Hartwell, Patricia L. (editor), Retrospective 1967-1987, Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1987, p. 135
  • Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell UP. 1985. Print
  • "Marisol." The Columbia Encyclopedia. Sixth Edition; April 22, 2004.
  • Potts, Alex. "The Image Valued 'As Found' And The Reconfiguring Of Mimesis In Post-War Art." Art History 37.4 (2014): 784-805. Art & Architecture Source. Web. 5 Dec. 2016.
  • Walsh, Laura. "Life of JFK depicted through art at Bruce Museum Exhibit", AP Worldstream September 19, 2003: pg. 8.
  • Westmacott, Jean. Marisol Escobar, Pop Art. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989.
  • Whiting, Cécile. "Figuring Marisol's Femininities." RACAR: Revue d'Art Canadienne / Canadian Art Review, vol. 18, no. 1/2, 1991, pp. 73–90.
  • Williams, Holly. "Name One Female Pop Artist ..... Go." The Independent (2015): n. pag.
  • 'Marisol Escobar- Biography", Rogallery, n.d. Web. September 21, 2015..
  • Artnet news obituary
  • Articite entry (French language)
  • Artcyclopedia entry
  • Latin Art Museum page in Spanish
  • Pop Art biography
  • Sculpture: Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe, Cast Bronze, 1982