The toast of 1960s New York, neglected Marisol finally gets her due

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When the 1960s art star Marisol died in 2016, a Buffalo museum got a stunning surprise: The New York sculptor had left her entire estate, including her art works, copyrights and Tribeca loft, to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum).

Seven years later, Montrealers are getting their own stunning surprise as AKG launches a powerful retrospective based on that gift at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Curated by AKG chief curator Cathleen Chaffee, the exhibition is a timely reminder of why Marisol was so justly (and unjustly) famous in the 1960s, and a fascinating investigation of the lesser-known work that followed. The show, based on Marisol’s gift but rounded out with key loans, is beginning a North American tour outside of Buffalo because the AKG has been busy completing the building project that changed its name. (The new G stands for Jeffrey Gundlach, the billionaire bond trader whose US$52.5-million in donations launched the US$230-million capital campaign that paid for a new wing at the museum.)

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So Montreal gets Marisol first and what an opportunity it is. If you have heard her name, it will be because of the larger-than-life totemic wooden figures she made in the 1960s, approachable and amusingly satirical to be sure, but also dark and complex as the artist critiqued politics and gender roles. LBJ (1967) is a monumental version of former U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson with portraits of his wife, Lady Bird, and his two daughters disguised as little house wrens perched on his upturned palm. Bicycle Race, of 1962, is a pair of gender-bending cyclists astride phallic bike saddles. The obviously male No. 1 pushes ahead of No. 2 – who has breasts and curving thighs but also, as a didactic panel at the MMFA cheerfully points out, testicles pencilled in under that bike seat.

Most importantly, there is The Generals, figures of George Washington and Simon Bolivar squeezed on to a barrel-shaped horse in a nod to Marisol’s two nationalities: Born in Paris, she was a Venezuelan whose family immigrated to California when she was a teen. The Generals, with its parody of heroic equestrian statuary (and comment on the United States’ fraught relations with Latin America) is key because the 1961-62 sculpture was the first work Marisol ever sold to a museum – and it was the then Albright-Knox that bought it, hence her remarkable gesture decades later. (AKG sold the Tribeca loft/studio and put the money in its endowment fund, but not before emptying it of its contents and incorporating them into its already impressive collection of 20th-century art.)

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Marisol, shortened from Maria Sol Escobar, was born into an affluent and peripatetic Venezuelan family in 1935, and the experience of migration and mixed identities clearly marked her work. In one of her earliest wooden sculptures, The Hungarians of 1955, she poses a refugee family of rough-hewn figures on a wheeled cart. Later, as if to insist on an existence that might seem in question or a presence that might feel invisible, she always used moulds of her own body and head, or photographs of her face, in sculptures of herself or others. In The Party of 1965-66, more than a dozen Marisols play all roles, from socialite to server, in a piece that is both a statement on shifting identity and critique of social stratification.

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By her late 20s, settled in the New York art scene after a detour to Rome and Paris in 1958-60, Marisol had become very famous. She was dark and taciturn, a mysterious and alluring figure who Andy Warhol said was “the first girl artist with glamour.” Warhol was a friend and supporter – her portrait of him and his films of her are included in the exhibition – but that kind of sexist condescension was a depressing feature of Marisol’s celebrity, the unjust part of her fame. When not wickedly exposing gender assumptions in her art, she often felt the need to flee the art world.

In the 1970s she began scuba diving in Tahiti and Mexico and subsequently created a series of sculptures in which her own face appears as the head of a fish. With smoother, less rusticated surfaces than her earlier pieces, they are beautifully displayed at the MMFA with her own underwater short films of the late 1970s as a backdrop.

They are gorgeous – and speak to a respect for nature and quest for ecological balance that only seem more pertinent today – but certainly less interesting than her people. Still on the fishy theme, a pair of lithographs featuring the distorted imprint of her own naked figure was inspired by the Japanese practice of recording a catch with an ink blot of the fish, but reveals an aggressive new tone in work about the female body.

These works were less popular than her earlier pieces and critics seem to respond negatively to Marisol’s increasing insistence that her art had never been all fun and games. In a series of misshapen masks from the mid-1970s, all moulded from her face, she distorts and vandalizes her own image while dangling stray items – a Coke can, a cigarette package – from them on long, thin strings.

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Lick the Tire of My Bicycle, a large pencil and pastel drawing of 1974, reprises the bicycle theme but this time the brake levers have become guns that unseen riders seem to be shooting into the derriere of a female cyclist. The MMFA installation also includes a poignant wall of the smaller body-part sculptures and casts she made over the years, from the 1960s through the 1990s; dismembered from her body, they offer many references to violence (a pair of brass knuckles) or hybridization (a sunburst face with fingers for rays).

This work, some of it erotic, some making gender-based violence explicit, did not sell well and in the 1980s Marisol turned to public sculpture and political portraiture. It seemed an unlikely move – and artist so determined to undercut social norms asked to celebrate society’s heroes – but she mainly took on subjects she respected. A room devoted to these works demonstrates a fascinating attempt to adapt a pop vocabulary to the hyperconservative field of commemorative statuary. South African bishop Desmond Tutu becomes a big purple wall as though his cassock itself could stop apartheid. A life-size John F. Kennedy Jr. salutes a parade of toy soldiers, his father’s funeral procession. For a monument (that was never built) to the Brooklyn Bridge’s engineers, Emily Roebling, who continued the work after her father-in-law died and husband became bedridden, sits front and centre, holding a rooster, symbol of victory.

Marisol suffered Alzheimer’s disease in the last decade of her life and, after the 1970s, she was never again cast as the glamour-girl art star. Not entirely forgotten but never truly remembered, in contrast to her celebrated male peers, she is an artist ripe for rediscovery. And it is her own remarkable gift that now makes that possible.

Marisol: A Retrospective continues at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to Jan. 21. It will show at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum from July, 2024, to January, 2025.

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