A Fascinating Retrospective Remembers ‘The Forgotten Star of Pop Art‘

(This review originally appeared on July 14; the exhibit runs through Jan. 6, 2025)

If one takes in the Buffalo AKG Museum’s expansive and comprehensive “Marisol” exhibit armed only with a little biographical information, it might be easy to mistake the artist as a privileged, celebrity dilettante rather than the free-spirited iconoclast she was: an important artist who produced a complex body of work filled with humanity reflecting her unique, sophisticated vision of the world.

Marisol (1930-2016) was the scion of a wealthy Venezuelan family whose tremendous oil wealth obviated any need to earn a living. Although she was formally trained, she walked out of Paris’ famed École Des Beaux Arts in 1949 after only a year of study, frustrated by a curriculum that consisted of copying the work of the masters.

She moved to New York in 1950, where she became associated with the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement, hanging around Greenwich Village’s Cedar Tavern with Jackson Pollock, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan and Robert Motherwell. Her first exhibit in 1957 was very successful but garnered so much personal attention that Marisol fled to Rome, returning to New York in 1960.

It was then that Marisol’s fame rose to its zenith, but the line snaking around West 57th Street to see her work at the 1966 Sidney Janis Gallery was due at least in part to her physical beauty, as she was fetishized in popular magazines which focused on her appearance; Andy Warhol (who cast her in several of his films) called Marisol the “first girl artist with glamour.”

The Buffalo AKG Retrospective

Marisol’s mother, tragically, committed suicide when Marisol was only 11, leaving Marisol choosing only to speak “when absolutely necessary.” This early trauma can be felt in her early work, filled with drawings and sculptures of families.

The exhibit proceeds chronologically. The viewer moves from her early works to the largest space, housing Marisol’s best-known and often politically-charged works. For example, “The Generals” (1961–62) features Simón Bolívar and George Washington as toy soldiers astride a wooden horse.

Here, Marisol is making a powerful political commentary about the Cold War tensions following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The exhibit catalogue quotes Drexel University art historian Delia Solomons, “In ‘Baby Boy,’ (not pictured) she’s showing the U.S. as this immature, towering, ferocious monster holding someone — specifically Marisol — in his grasp.”

In the early 1970s Marisol took up scuba diving in Tahiti and her work remained infused with overt political and environmental overtones, challenging the U.S. militarization of the seas and the refugee crisis created by the Vietnam War (some of these themes are prevalent in the AKG’s “After The Sun” exhibit, currently on display and reviewed here). In 1991 she pivoted to set design, creating the set for Martha Graham’s ballet “Eyes of the Goddess” as displayed by ephemera in a case at the exhibit.

Marisol’s Connection To Buffalo

In 1962 Seymour Knox, Jr. was the first to purchase her work (“The Generals”) for museum display, creating a lifelong relationship that culminated in Marisol’s bequeathment of her artistic legacy to the Buffalo AKG Museum. The current exhibit represents the most comprehensive collection of her work and includes pieces from the AKG, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The light of her fame burned bright but briefly; as Buffalo AKG Chief Curator Cathleen Chaffee said, “[s]he was a massive celebrity for 10 years and then most people don’t know what she did after.”

In fact, Marisol never strayed from her unique artistic vision; indeed, one speculates that she preferred anonymity over the media’s perverse celebrity fetishization.

As the Buffalo AKG’s excellent exhibit demonstrates, Marisol was many things. She was an iconoclast who never fit the “Pop Art” label attached to her, a deeply private person who was her own most prolific model, and an celebutante who avoided the spotlight.

The Buffalo AKG’s retrospective of her work is doubtless the artistic highlight of the summer. It is not to be missed.

“Marisol” is on display at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum until January 6, 2025. More information can be found here.