Strolling along Fifth Avenue is to experience a real life catwalk; it's a ritual that has a long and storied history. Marisol Escobar's society lady in On The Avenue is impossibly slim with impressively long legs. Cloaked in a 1960s sheath, she wears two accessories that were de riguer then: a little dog and a hat. And that hat looks like the artist planted a Ponytail palm on her head. I know, because there is one just like it sitting in my living room. Ponytail Palms are not actually palms which is only fitting as fashion works best with a pinch of artifice. For Marisol, mimicry was useful for critiquing sexual politics in a way both pointed and fanciful.
Marisol studied with the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hoffmann in the early 1950s but her sculptures began to prefigure Pop Art by the late fifties. So it was hardly surprising that she attracted the attention of Leo Castelli, whose Manhattan gallery, opened in 1957, became the forward outpost of Pop.
Seymour Knox, a founder of the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. purchased several works by Marisol in the early 1960s for the museum. Whenever I would visit the city I looked forward to seeing The Generals (1961-62). Simon Bolivar and George Washington sit astride a larger-than-life sized wooden horse. Another favorite of mine, Baby Girl (1963), shows a little girl sitting with a Marisol doll om her lap. An early critique of the postwar culture that infantilized women?
Marisol had a cosmopolitan personality that fit the New York art world nicely. Born in Paris to wealthy Venezuelan family, Marisol grew into a worker bee in art. "(C)onside ring her work habits, the frequency with which she appears at uptown art openings an parties is nothing short of astonishing."
With the loss of her longtime dealer Sydney Janis in 1989 Marisol lost a gallerist whose simpatico with her work would be not be easily replaced. The Albright-Knox Gallery has long been home to the largest collection of Marisol's work: when she died, Marisol left her estate to the museum.
Image: Marisol Escobar - On The Avenue, 1961-62, acrylic paint and graphite on plaster and wood.
4 comments:
I loved Marisol Escobar's work, but I wonder how "of its time" it was in 1961. Were viewers shocked?
The shape of On The Avenue was nothing I could think of, except for The Kiss sculpture by Constantin Brancusi. From different parts of the world and different eras of course, but the long legs and the square topped dog looked familiar.
http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/brancusi/highlights.html and
https://www.ebay.com/itm/303992113092
Hels, for myself, I think Marisol was ahead of her time. Especially her female subjects.
The little man dog on leash is funny too !
Tania, yes! His little suit and tie are the finishing touches.
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