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Born Marisol Escobar in 1930 in Paris, Marisol first studied at
the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Julian. In 1950
she moved to New York and continued her studies between 1951 and
1954 at the Hans Hofmann School and the Art Students' League. Influenced
by Duchamp, Native American art, the Italian renaissance, as well
as many other, more personal influences, the artist began to experiment
with assemblages made of discarded wood and other found elements
in the fifties. In 1958 she had her first individual exhibition
at the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. Marisol was a major figure
in the Pop Art movement, using pop culture images from magazines
to paste onto her wooden figures; she created a John Wayne in this
manner in 1963, the same year Warhol produced his first Marilyn.
Another famous work from 1963 is the monstrous Baby Girl
(Albright-Knox Art Gallery) in which a tiny figure of the artist
stands on the lap of an six-feet-high seated wooden child.
In Marisol’s sculpted portraits, the element of the hand is
always very important. For example, Picasso (1981) has two sets
of hands, one set resting on a chair, the other on his knees; DeKooning
(1980) has three hands. This plastic cast of her own hand clearly
emphasizes the importance of the artist’s hand, the primary
medium for most artistic creation. Marisol’s focus on the hand
rather than the face also is a reference to her own silence about
her work and her preference to let her creative actions speak for
themselves.
Source for biographical information: Grove Dictionary of Art,
MacMillan, 2000.
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Eleanor Heartney, "Marisol: A Sculptor of Modern Life,
Neuberger Museum," New York Times, 8/01
“For over four decades, Marisol has been engaged in weaving
a marvelous tapestry of human foibles, tragedies and ambitions.
From this end of her career, her distance from the conventional
notion of Pop Art is increasingly clear. Yet there is no other movement
which seems capable of encompassing the range of her achievements.
As I suggested at the outset, she seems best placed with other social
commentators like Ed Kienholz, Red Grooms, and George Segal. On
a formal level, she is perhaps closest to Kienholz, who also created
figures and human environments out of the detritus of modern urban
life. But her tone is very different than his. Kienholz tends toward
horrific portraits of the family and the American scene. His figures
are composed of found objects -- sewing tables, tricycles and baby
strollers, fish bowls, animal bones -- arranged to bring out a sense
of dehumanization and degradation.
Compare this with Marisol's family portraits. She was capable of
highly satirical depictions -- for instance, a 1963 The Family,
which depicts an upscale middle class family with a distant, stalwart
dad, a mindless fashionable mom and four children, two insufferable
toddlers and two babies in a carriage. But she also can deal with
the subject with great empathy, as we have seen in works like the
1962 The Family and Poor Family I. For Kienholz, the
family is a nightmare, while for Marisol, it is the building block
of society and subject to the same tensions and difficulties as
the rest of the culture. She gives form to Baudelaire's remark,
"The lover of life makes the whole world his family."
Another social commentator; Red Grooms, shares her cheekiness and
astute observation of telling details, but he is also more completely
a parodist. Like Marisol, Grooms has created numerous portraits
of other artists, but these tend to focus on the absurdity of the
avant gardist impulse as it appears to the non-art public. And when
he deals with Native Americans, he tends to draw his references
from immediately recognizable media images rather than direct experience.
Oddly, considering how different their work is formally, the artist
whose vision comes closest to Marisol's is George Segal. His white
plaster casts of anonymous urban types in generic urban settings
share the sense of humanism and sympathy that has been increasingly
apparent in Marisol's more recent work. Like her; he is drawn to
the vulnerabilities and the poignant struggles of his characters.
He reminds us that we are all part of the same crazy world.
In the end, labels like Pop or Abstract-Expressionism are less important
than the enduring qualities of the art they describe. In Marisol's
case what endures is the universality of the impulses she captures.
Truly a sculptor of modern life, she evokes the venality of social
climbers, the integrity of great artists, the contradictions of
the powerful and the quiet dignity of the dispossessed. She feels
both their absurdity and their pain and encourages us to do the
same.”
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