The Brooklyn Rail

During her lifetime, the Parisian-born, Venezuelan American artist Marisol (1930–2016) was a bona fide celebrity. Through her association with the Pop art movement, she caught the attention of Andy Warhol, who adored her, and became a denizen of the Factory. Frank O’Hara called her the “Maria Callas of the New York School” in his 1961 poem “Macaroni,” and in the 1960s, viewers lined the sidewalks outside of her exhibitions in New York for their chance to see her recent work. Her doings were chronicled not just by the art magazines, but mainstream rags like Time, Life, and People. But though she produced assiduously till the end of her life, her star faded as she aged, and by the time of her death seven years ago, she was rarely considered. Marisol bequeathed an unprecedented collection of her work to the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, the first institution to acquire one of her sculptures in the early 1960s. Organized by Buffalo AKG (where the exhibition will travel next year as part of a multi-venue tour), Marisol: A Retrospective now open at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts seeks to resurrect Marisol’s reputation and shed new light on her recently, and undeservedly, neglected life and career.

Comprised of over 250 works, the show opens with a gut punch of a sculpture, Mi mama y yo (1968) placed alone in the center of a rotunda just outside the entryway to the rest of the exhibition. Depicting two blocky, wooden figures perched upon a wrought-iron garden bench, the mother sits with a toothy grin, hands in lap while the child stands on the bench beside her, holding an umbrella over their heads, a discontented grimace on her face. Notably, the umbrella is not solid but made of lattice-worked metal that echoes the pattern of the bench they rest upon—an imperfect shield against the elements. Upon entering the exhibition, the audience will soon learn that the artist’s own mother died by suicide when Marisol was just eleven years-old and that she stopped speaking for years afterwards. This profound reaction to her mother’s death might be one of the earliest indications of Marisol’s exquisite sensitivity, traces of which are visible throughout her body of work but which her “it girl” status belied in her lifetime.

After setting the stage with Mi mama y yo, the exhibition wends chronologically through Marisol’s expansive output, with the first gallery given over to her earliest years in New York, where she had settled in 1950 after a peripatetic childhood spent between there, Paris, Caracas, and Los Angeles. She studied for a time with Hans Hofmann, but was soon drawn to the three-dimensional over painting. Two sculptures of cats (both dated 1957) cut from chunky blocks of wood perch in a vitrine and gaze with glass feline eyes across the room. Their rough-hewn quality attests to Marisol’s affinity for both pre-Columbian and American folk art in both subject and material, traces of which can be seen throughout her entire body of work. Wood, especially, was a medium of choice for Marisol, but also on view are early sculptures in terracotta, which she experimented with in the 1950s and which drew the attention of Leo Castelli, who gave Marisol her first show in 1957. The resounding success of that first exhibition overwhelmed her, and rather than embracing it, Marisol left New York soon afterwards for over a year to escape the attention. This forward motion followed by retreat would become a theme of the artist’s life, as she periodically took off on world travels when the confines of the New York art world became oppressive.

Upon her eventual return to New York, in 1960, Marisol began making castings of her own body parts, and acknowledged the period as the beginning of her “real development,” as she referred to it. Her 1962 show at the Stable Gallery was a smashing success and cemented her celebrity. Working prolifically throughout the 1960s, the exhibition is rife with outstanding examples from this period, including some of Marisol’s best known works, like the oversized wood infant Baby Boy (1962–63) and its “sister” Baby Girl (1963). These massive sculptures depict grotesque versions of babies sourced from studio photography, monstrous and hulking in their portrayal of early childhood. An ambiguity towards parenthood once again pervades, as does a possible feminist reproach to the many journalists who at the time thought nothing of asking this accomplished artist when she planned to settle down, get married, have children. Time and again, the personal and the political entwine in her work.

Also on view are a number of her drawings, the skill and breadth of which merit their own, future exhibition. Of particular note are a number of “not-quite” two-dimensional works like Face Behind a Mask (1961) where Marisol fitted a wood carving of her face within a circular cutout in a drawing depicting two lovers kissing in profile. The small, framed pieces prefigure much larger works like The Bathers (1961–62), which begins as a painting on a large wooden panel and then ingeniously “spills over” into the three-dimensional. A sunbather whose upper body is drawn on the panel is completed by wooden, sculpted legs, crossed in repose and placed before the drawing so as to appear a seamless, unified whole. Two other sunbathing figures luxuriate in front of the panel, fully emancipated from two dimensions. The tension between the 2D and 3D, the push and pull between representation and embodiment, feels emblematic of the many dichotomies Marisol ping-ponged between in both her life and work.

Marisol was so productive, her work took so many routes and approaches, it’s clear that a case for restoring her to the conversation of twentieth-century art is necessary and overdue, and this survey makes important first strides. That she was forward-thinking and ahead of her time seems unimpeachable, and perhaps no more so than in the gallery dedicated to her “aquatic” works. In 1969, after another triumphant show in New York, representing Venezuela at the 1968 Venice Bienniale, and being included as one of only four women in the most recent iteration of documenta, Marisol retreated from the attention once again, this time to Tahiti, where she became a certified scuba diver. She spent much of the next decade diving, especially in Cozumel, Mexico, a place for which she developed a special fondness. Her work from this period shifts, and is singularly mature and profound, exemplified by a sculpture like Barracuda (1971). At nearly twelve feet long, it is composed of a sleek piece of wood carved in the shape of the eponymous fish. This sculpture, like others from this period, rejects the coarse and unfinished wood of much of her previous work, in favor of a smoothed and varnished surface. Rather than the face of the fish, however, Marisol inserted a resin cast of her own face, baring teeth. This melding of self with marine animal—one who lives in solitude rather than schools, and attacks by surprise—points to the contradictions the artist epitomized, and those which she saw in the world and manifested throughout her long, complex career. Still waters run deep.