Marisol Escobar

Marisol Escobar, also known simply as Marisol, was a Venezuelan American artist born in Paris, who primarily lived and worked in New York City. She became world-famous in the mid-1960s but lapsed into relative obscurity within a decade. She continued to create her artworks and returned to the limelight in the early 21st century, capped by a 2014 major retrospective show organized by the Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee.

Marisol’s childhood was ambulatory, growing up in Paris, New York and Caracas. In 1946 the family relocated to Los Angeles where Marisol began her formal arts education with night classes at the Otis Art Institute and the Jepson Art Institute. Marisol then studied art at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts in 1949 before returning to the United States to continue at the Art Students League of New York. The move back to New York would prove decisive for her future career. Stephen Vider writes (in ‘Marisol and Warhol Take New York’, Journal of American History, Issue 1, June 2023):

Raised in Paris and Los Angeles, Marisol moved to New York in 1950 and soon began drawing the attention of gallery owners and magazine editors with her life-size figural sculptures crafted from wood and terra-cotta. She had her first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1957, and the following year was featured in Life magazine. By the end of 1961, she moved to the Stable Gallery, owned by Ward, where she would have two more solo exhibitions in the next three years. It was also where she would meet Warhol, who had his own solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery in December 1962.

Marisol quickly became associated with the Pop art movement as it emerged in the 1960s, enhancing her recognition and popularity. By 1961 - 1962 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 experienced a meteoric rise in the following decade when her sales rivalled those of her friend Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987), who included her in several of his early experimental films like Kiss (1963) and 13 Most Beautiful Girls (1964).

Marisol mimicked the imaginary construct of what it means to be a woman, as well as the role of the “artist”. She accomplished this through combining sensibilities of both Action painting and Pop art: utilizing the spontaneous gesture of expression within Action painting along with the cool and collected artistic intent of Pop art. Marisol’s sculptures questioned the authenticity of the constructed self, suggesting it was instead contrived from representational parts.

Marisol’s artistic practice has often been excluded from art history, both by art critics and early feminists. For feminists her work was often perceived as reproducing tropes of femininity from an uncritical standpoint, therefore repeating modes of valorization they hoped to move past. Although, Pop art critics would use her “femininity” as the conceptual framework to distinguish the difference between her sentimentality and that of her male associates’ objectivity. Marisol produced satiric social commentaries in concern to gender and race, which being a woman of color is a circumstance she lives in. Instead of omitting her subjectivity, she used her “femininity” as a mode of deconstructing and redefining the ideas of “woman” and “artist”, giving herself control of her own representation.

As a woman, and a foreigner in New York, Marisol often felt that she was perceived as an outsider. In the 1960s she was the only artist consistently featured in US exhibitions of “American” and “Latin American” art: classified as a US artist in My Country ‘Tis of Thee (Dwan Gallery, New York, 1962), the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Annual Exhibition (New York, 1964), and American Art Today (New York’s World Fair, 1964) versus as Venezuelan in the Carnegie Museum of Art’s International (1958 – 59), The United States Collects Pan American Art (Art Institute of Chicago, 1959), and in the catalogue Art of Latin America since Independence (Yale University Art Gallery and University of Texas at Austin, 1966-67). Delia Solomons, Assistant Professor of Art History at Drexel University, writes (in ‘Marisol’s Antimonument: Masculinity, Pan-Americanism, and Other Imaginaries’, The Art Bulletin, September 2020): “Marisol reflected on the absurdity of such categories in her journal while travelling in the 1950s: ‘I am the Venezuelan, living in Italy – that has an English car with North American plates and Swiss insurance – and they ask me what nationality I am’ ”.

The fact that Marisol’s broader repertoire of imagery was devoted to homo- and nonbinary eroticism, often promoting queer enfranchisement through representational inclusivity, would prove another obstacle for Marisol. Delia Solomons, who has pointed out that Marisol probably influenced Warhol in this respect, as they both (in the 1960s) “transposed” underground gay themes “into new materials, larger formats, and public arenas” (Warhol for instance in his iconic silk-screened Double Elvis, 1963 and film Lonesome Cowboys, 1968) writes:

[…] in the midst of a deeply homophobic period in US history – when masculinity was pressured and policed to keep within the bounds of staunch heterosexuality and the state defined its queer citizens as un-American. Marisol was likely sensitive to these threats not only in view of her connections to queer social and cultural worlds in New York but also as a fellow outsider with qualities deemed un-American: an immigrant who never obtained US citizenship and a woman with great career aspirations, no husband, and no children, who openly discussed the fact that she smoked marijuana, and had sex outside of marriage, and got an abortion.

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. One good example could be found in Tom Wesselman (1931 – 2004) and his Great American Nude series (1961 – 1973). As Judy Chicago explained to Holly Williams, in her interview for The Independent in 2015, there was very little recognition for female artists and artists of color. She was one of many artists disregarded due to the existing modernist canon, which positioned her outside of the core of pop as the feminine opposite to her established male counterparts.

Working within a patriarchal field, women often obscured their gender identity in fear of their work being reduced to a “female sensibility”. Marisol was one of the few who instead embraced her gender identity wholeheartedly. 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. Like many artists at that time feared, the female sensibility was the reason Marisol was often marginalized.

Marisol was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1978, and received several awards, including the 1997 Premio Gabriela Mistral from the Organization of American States for her contribution to Inter-American culture. Marisol last lived in the TriBeCa district of New York City and was in frail health towards the end of her life. She suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and died on April 30, 2016, in New York City from pneumonia, aged 85. 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.

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