Marisol’s Totemic Pop Art Sculptures Get an Overdue Retrospective

María Sol Escobar, the Venezuelan American artist known as Marisol, believed in the power of museums to educate and inspire change. As a child, she visited institutions around the world as she moved with her peripatetic family from Paris to the United States and Caracas, and later traveled frequently on her own. Marisol enrolled in art courses everywhere she moved (including the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1949, and the Art Students League in New York from 1951–63), developing a remarkable range of skills that informed her diverse practice, which ultimately spanned sculpture, drawing, photography, painting, set and costume design, and printmaking.

She became a celebrated figure in Pop Art in the 1960s, socializing and working with other artists, such as Andy Warhol. However, as her star grew, Marisol became increasingly wary of the art world and often withdrew from the limelight; broader understanding of her work waned as early as the 1970s. Marisol’s influence was largely overlooked despite her prolific, successful career through the early 2000s, when her production slowed as she began to struggle with memory loss in 2006.

“Marisol: A Retrospective,” a comprehensive traveling exhibition that opened October 7th at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA), hopes to redress this balance, giving Marisol’s work the platform it deserves, following the artist’s death in 2016. The exhibition, which will continue onto the Toledo Museum of Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Dallas Museum of Art, spans nearly six decades and is arranged chronologically and thematically with over 250 works, including mixed-media and wooden sculptures, drawings, prints, film, and photography, as well as ephemera from the artist’s vast archive. The show is particularly broad because it is curated from the artist’s own estate, which she bequeathed to the Buffalo AKG, the first institution to collect the artist’s work in 1962. Curators at the museum have spent the last seven years cataloging and researching this historic bequest.

Born in Paris in 1930 to Venezuelan parents, Marisol spent her childhood traveling across Venezuela, Europe, and the U.S., developing a deep appreciation for different cultures and artistic genres, including pre-Columbian, folk, and Pop Art. She received her first solo show in 1957 at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York and rose to prominence in the city in the 1950s and ’60s. Particularly celebrated for her life-size totemic figural sculptures, Marisol often used her own likeness, a double-edged sword that propelled her fame but also left her susceptible to gender stereotypes and misogyny.

Drawing from her own experiences as a woman, artist, and foreigner in many of the places she lived, Marisol developed remarkably prescient perspectives. Using her artistic practice as a platform, she examined issues of social justice, animal intelligence, ecology, war, sexuality, and the treatment of women and immigrants.

Materials were especially important to Marisol. She experimented with stone, wood carving, plaster casting, and terracotta from the beginning of her career in the 1950s. In particular, her roughly carved, figural wood sculptures showed the influence of American folk art. “Marisol didn’t leave a lot of commentary or notes about her work,” said Cathleen Chaffee, Buffalo AKG’s chief curator, who curated the retrospective, in an interview. “But we do know that she embraced experimentation and problem solving. Apart from a few collaborative disciplines like printmaking, dance, and public commissions, she worked alone.” Even in these early works, Marisol combined found and repurposed materials like wheels, glass, and stone. By the 1960s, her range of materials exploded as she created larger and more complex assemblages, often incorporating her own image or casts of her face and hands. These colorful, mixed-media sculptures propelled Marisol’s career as she developed a signature style that was uniquely her own.

Often installed in groups, such as her famous work The Party (1965–66), these pieces referenced pressing issues. “Marisol addressed concerns that were groundbreaking at the time,” said Mary-Dailey Desmarais, chief curator of the MMFA and curator of the exhibition’s presentation in Montreal. “These issues resonate with present-day concerns. It’s remarkable how much of an icon she was and how relevant her work is today, and yet she’s not well known in Montreal.”

The exhibition features several of these works displayed like a parade of quirky, cartoonish characters, including two colossal babies: a seven-foot-tall Baby Boy (1962–63) and six-foot-tall Baby Girl (1963). With twinkling eyes and cute expressions, the giant-headed babies look innocent and sweet. Ephemera from Marisol’s archive displayed alongside the sculptures reveal the source materials as found photographs of two unidentified children in gelatin silver prints. Each baby in Marisol’s work holds a tiny female figure, perhaps representing their mothers, whose needs are often minimized by society’s expectations of women as caretakers. Other works include more provocative source material, such as Three Women With Umbrella (1965–66), a trio of figures featuring part of a heartbreaking image from Life magazine of distressed South Vietnamese civilians after the Battle of Dong Xoai in the Vietnam War.

From the 1970s onwards, Marisol increasingly examined social issues in her work, depicting politicians, artists, cultural leaders, and herself, as well as imagery from popular culture and advertisements across various disciplines. Her use of wood took a drastic shift as her boxy shapes and rough surfaces gave way to highly varnished figures, as well as fish inspired by her months spent learning to scuba dive in Tahiti at the end of 1969 and subsequent years filming and photographing underwater. “She certainly wanted a break from the art world, but she was also increasingly opposed to violence and war. She found solace in the beauty of the ocean and the interconnectedness of different species,” said Desmarais.

Though they were panned at the time of their debut in 1973 at Sidney Janis Gallery, the curvilinear, glossy sculptures are some of the most exciting in the exhibition. So shiny they look wet, these freestanding sculptures feature larger-than-life fish, including needlefish, zebrasoma, and parrotfish, as well as notoriously aggressive species like barracudas, all bearing human faces with distorted expressions. Further blurring the human-animal divide, Marisol gave a sculpture of a diver the face of a fish in The Fisherman (1973). In her choice of fish whose names had been used for Navy vessels and that were shaped like missiles, Marisol drew attention to the fraught international circumstances during the Cold War and the militarization of the oceans.