The rising star of his generation. The most fascinating of pop art. The first glamorous female artist — that, according to Warhol. Marisol (1930-2016), whose full name is Maria Sol Escobar, marked the 1960s with her figurative wooden sculptures. The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) is hosting the most important retrospective devoted to this daughter of Venezuelan parents, born in Paris and active on the New York scene.
The exhibition brings together 250 works — never before so many by Marisol in one place — and rich documentation (photographic resources and press clippings, in particular). Organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, depository of the artist’s works since his death, Marisol: a retrospectivebegins his journey in Montreal, before visiting three cities in the United States. The closure of the New York establishment due to expansion and the long-standing interest of the MMFA (or its director Stéphane Aquin) in pop art coincided.
Through her avant-garde themes (characters with ambiguous identities, environmentalist discourse), the sculptor (and designer) remains relevant sixty years after her debut. “Two hundred people a day visited his exhibitions. He was a mega star,” said Stéphane Aquin during the press day.
Marisol, doesn’t that mean anything to you? No worries. The artist was a media rocket. Vogue, life, Glamour are talking about it. Time, for his part, devotes his cover page, twice rather than once, if we rely on one of the windows which punctuate the exhibition. During the 1970s, Marisol lost her appeal and, although she did not stop creating, disappeared from collective memory. Upon his death, The Guardian calls her a forgotten star.
Cathleen Chaffee, chief curator of the Buffalo museum, considers that several factors worked against her, including her condition as a Latin American woman and her penchant for an outsider art – “folk”, in the words of the curator of the retrospective. And his work of sculpture in direct size does not correspond to the mechanical reproduction targeted by pop art.
“Her subjects are really pop, but no one identified them as that when people discovered her in 1962,” says Cathleen Chaffee. The first critics who speak of pop art give Marisol as an example of what pop is not. In the eyes of the public, it was pop, but in the eyes of the critics, it was great. Pop is not made by hand. »
Relief and flat
The course at the MMFA, designed by chief curator Mary-Dailey Desmarais, is largely chronological. It begins with works from the 1950s, inspired by pre-Columbian art, with which Marisol explores wood, plaster, stone, bronze. She also practices drawing, which turns out to be, over the course of the exhibition, a recurring activity and not a youthful eccentricity.
Success arriving early in his career, during his thirties, his most important works found their place in the following two rooms. Sculpture in reclaimed wood and found objects dominates. The dimensions are so large that everything seems to lack space, but without affecting the appreciation of the figures.
The Marisol signature is enjoyable — “fun, refreshing, sarcastic,” to quote Cathleen Chaffee. The characters are partly sculpted, partly drawn or painted, when they are not photographs which appear at the height of the faces. This unusual fusion of volume and flat surface announces the explosion of forms and identities, which modernism does not yet advocate.
With its two vaguely nudist cyclists, Bike race (1962) certainly makes you smile, but is surprising by the saddle which extends the genital organ and by the presence of a hybrid being, not to say trans. Andy (1962-1963), a portrait by Warhol, is emblematic of the fragmentation Marisol resorts to, including the famous model’s real shoes. The multiplication of faces (Warhol appears seen in profile and from the front) allows elsewhere, with Ruth (1962), to represent the protagonist in a circular and cyclical form, i.e. at several moments and in several looks.
These sculptures, notable for their bright colors and play on scale, made the artist financially successful. The exhibition does not bring them together for the first time. Its originality lies elsewhere, in the drawings and documents and in practically all the works after the 1960s placed in the last rooms.
In this little-known lot that the Buffalo museum inherited, we find Marisol’s environmental (and marine) concerns. They translate into anti-speciesist sculptures magnifying fish and a less interesting series of underwater photographs. We also face a more caustic feminism (erotic drawings tinged with violence) and a more morbid tone (apparently mortuary masks, lonely feet).
In her glorious years, Marisol turned heads, between her appearances in magazines and the portraits that Warhol, Hans Namuth, Duane Michals and Robert Mapplethorpe painted of her. Afterwards, as the exhibition shows very well, she devoted herself to the world of dance, designing sets and costumes, then to public art.
Did the artist have to die to be rediscovered? Probably, as the interest of the Buffalo Museum is linked to it. But Marisol also benefits from revisions of art history, led to look beyond dogmas. Pop art, Cathleen Chaffee points out, should not be restricted to its borrowings from the world of consumption. Nor to white males. “Great pop art,” she says, “is broader, international, Latino, feminine, politicized. »