Meet Marisol, The 1960s Pop Art Superstar The World Forgot About

The “first girl artist with glamour.”

So said Andy Warhol in 1964 of his Pop art contemporary and friend Marisol.

Cringeworthy now, the notoriously image-conscious Warhol likely meant it as a compliment. At the time, Marisol’s fame exceeded his.

She was the one with coverage in the Times. With interest from MoMA. Featured in “LIFE” and “Time” magazine.

“She saw droves line up for her 1960s exhibitions, and, according to one critic, was ‘written about more than any living artist in women’s magazines as well as art journals,’” Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, told Forbes.com.

Upon Marisol’s death in 2016, she bequeathed hundreds of artworks, thousands of photographs, and piles of ephemera to the institution, making it the leading repository for her work in the world.

So, what happened?

How come Marisol’s name today is only familiar among the arty set–and not even that well known among them?

“When she went on to make works that were less easily accessible for audiences than those of the 1950s, including her works of the 1970s that tackled ecological and feminist issues, much of the attention evaporated,” Chaffee explains. “The image that persisted of her in the public or in the media as a kind of starlet failed to account for the complexity and breadth of her practice and her identity.”

The “Latin Garbo” as she was known for her striking beauty and fashion sense. A tantalizing mystique as well. A childhood trauma resulted in her rarely speaking.

“She remains perhaps the most intriguing and least understood artist associated with Pop art. Although she was at the center of the New York art world in the 1960s, and helped define the Pop movement, she always followed her own interests,” Chaffee continued. “That meant that for much of the rest of her career she was making work that failed to resonate with critics at the time, but paradoxically today seems ahead of its time.”

In a fate regularly befalling beautiful women, Marisol’s beauty was more remembered–the starlet–than her accomplishments.

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum begins remedying that with “Marisol: A Retrospective,” the most significant exhibition ever dedicated to her, nearly 250 artworks from across her career on view, including 39 for the first time.

“She was a powerful, influential, and extraordinarily inventive artist whose contributions to 20th century art have been vastly underestimated,” Chaffee, who curated the retrospective, said. “Her main sculptural mediums were body casts, found objects, and wood that she transformed into life-sized figures and figural groups. Her combination of found elements, drawn and sculpted surfaces was wholly unique, as was her approach to representing numerous perspectives on the same subject within a cohesive, yet multiplied sculptural field. This made her work instantly recognizable in an emerging field of artists experimenting with silkscreen and then Minimalist sculpture.”

The Party

Marisol, short for María Sol Escobar, was born to wealthy Venezuelan parents in Paris in 1930. Her mother’s suicide when the artist was 11, combined with the family’s money, produced an itinerate childhood seeing her travel and live variously between Europe, Venezuela and the U.S. She ultimately settled and studied in New York.

After her mother’s death, Marisol did not speak again until her early 20s, and only little after that for the remainder of her life.

In the 1960s, she was lauded as the rising woman artist of her generation. Her boxy wooden sculptures were the talk of the town. Pop culture subjects like the Kennedy Family, Andy Warhol, and John Wayne, but pieces that also tackled women’s roles in society, norms of gender and sexuality at midcentury, self-identity, Cold War politics, and the immigrant experience. The satirical and deceptively political sculptures helped define Pop art in the 1960s.

“Marisol added only enough details to convey the impression of a person—a cast hand, an upturned toe, buttocks, breasts, a phallus—leaving more of the figure simply suggested and unfinished than any figurative sculptor before her,” Chaffee said. “These blocky forms often evoked Ancient Greek herms as well as Egyptian sculpture. They act as invitations to the viewer to complete the work, to fill in the blanks. They are so effectively immersive and participatory we don’t even realize how engaged we become while viewing.”

Numerous examples are on view in the Buffalo retrospective, including the most famed, 1965 and 66’s The Party.

“The Party is really Marisol’s tour de force sculpture of the 1960s. Each of the 15 blocky figures at this ball has a version of the artist’s face as well as cast body parts, and most figures are dressed to the nines as if posing at an uptown formal party,” Chaffee explains. “The VIPs wear painted dresses and a suit as well as actual cuttings from gowns belonging to Marisol. The maid and the butler are dressed formally as well.”

Appearances can be deceiving. Chaffee finds the work paradoxical.

“It’s incredibly fun to look at and one can’t help, but delight in all the details Marisol lavished upon the subjects—there are all at once actual costume jewels, cast jewels, and a lightbox with a photograph of jewels, for example. A central figure has a gown that looks like it’s based on Matisse cut-outs and a hairdo/crown cast from one of Marisol’s own sculptures of the 1950s, but for however much pleasure it gives audiences, it also doesn’t look like a fun party to attend,” she said. “No one is actually interacting with anyone else, and many of the details Marisol includes seem to suggest the visual manifestation of each figure’s own personality flaws. A magazine clipping of a man’s hand is glued on the torso of one woman as if it’s about to grab her breast. Everything seems to be about appearance in a way that is stifling, but fascinating to watch.”

On the back of works like The Party, Marisol represented Venezuela at the 1968 Venice Biennale. Shortly thereafter, she’d disconnect from the mainstream art world, always making work, but not making the scene. Marisol was forgotten.

Marisol Comes To Buffalo

The relationship between the Buffalo AKG and Marisol began in 1962, when, with the purchase of The Generals (1961–62) from the artist’s solo exhibition that year at the Stable Gallery, the museum became the first institution to acquire her work. The acquisition of Baby Girl (1963) followed soon thereafter.

From 1964 to 1993, Marisol was represented by the New York gallery led by Buffalo native Sidney Janis, who fostered the artist’s career. This history seems to have inspired her decision to leave her estate to the Buffalo AKG.

“In late 2016, I had the privilege of being one of the first people to enter Marisol’s Tribeca loft after her death, along with our museum’s Director Janne Sirén. It was immediately clear that this space belonged to someone completely dedicated to her art,” Chaffee remembers. “Besides small living areas, every inch was filled with artworks and the tools she used to make them. Images pinned to the wall and books all around were reminders of her extensive travel; her love of scuba diving; her work’s inclusion in hundreds of exhibitions including major shows in Venezuela and Japan; and her closeness with so many of the greatest artists of the 20th century.”

All of it, including the loft, was gifted to the museum.

“Flipping through one notebook, I found the attendee list for her fiftieth birthday dinner in 1980. It included Edward Albee, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Halston, Bill Katz, Ruth Kligman, Elisa Monte, Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers, George Segal, and Andy Warhol, among others,” Chaffee said. “The trust Marisol had placed in our museum was almost unbelievable. Subsequently, our museum’s staff spent weeks within this space, evaluating, photographing, inventorying, and packing. Back in Buffalo, even during the early, intense months of the COVID pandemic, our team worked–masked and in shifts–to continue cataloguing, conserving, and photographing her bequest, a process that is still ongoing.”

In total, roughly 600 drawings and prints, 100 sculptures, 6,000 photographs, along with her papers, her library, her tools. The exhibition draws largely on the works Marisol kept in her possession until the end. Each item a puzzle piece in returning the artist to her rightful place in history.

“Marisol: A Retrospective” opened at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts on October 7, 2023, and subsequently traveled to the Toledo Museum of Art. Following the presentation in Buffalo, which will conclude on January 6, 2025, the exhibition’s final stop will be the Dallas Museum of Art, where it will be on view from February 23 through July 6, 2025.