The “first artist with glamour”.

That’s what Andy Warhol said in 1964 about his pop art contemporary and friend Marisol.

It’s embarrassing today, but the notoriously image-conscious Warhol probably meant it as a compliment. Back then, Marisol was more famous than he was.

She was the one with reporting in the Just. With interest from MoMA. Featured in LIFE and Time magazines.

“Her exhibitions in the 1960s drew hordes of people, and according to one critic, ‘more was written about her in women’s magazines and art journals than about any other living artist,'” Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach’s chief curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, told Forbes.com.

After her death in 2016, Marisol bequeathed hundreds of artworks, thousands of photographs and a wealth of ephemera to the institution, making it the world’s most important repository for her work.

So what happened?

How is it that Marisol’s name is only known in the art scene today – and not even particularly well known there?

“When she later created works that were less accessible to audiences than those of the 1950s, including her 1970s works that addressed environmental and feminist issues, much of the attention disappeared,” explains Chaffee. “The image that existed in the public or in the media of her as a kind of starlet did not take into account the complexity and breadth of her work and her identity.”

The “Latin Garbo” as she was known for her striking beauty and her sense of fashion. She also had a seductive mystique. Due to a childhood trauma, she hardly spoke anymore.

“She remains perhaps the most fascinating and least understood artist of Pop Art. Although she was at the center of the New York art world in the 1960s and helped shape the Pop movement, she always pursued her own interests,” Chaffee continued. “This meant that for much of the rest of her career she produced work that was not well received by critics at the time but now seems, paradoxically, ahead of its time.”

As often happens with the fate of beautiful women, Marisol – the starlet – was remembered more for her beauty than for her achievements.

The Buffalo AKG Art Museum is now trying to remedy this problem: With “Marisol: A Retrospective,” the most significant exhibition ever dedicated to her, nearly 250 works of art from her entire career will be on display, including 39 that are being shown for the first time.

“She was a powerful, influential and extraordinarily inventive artist whose contribution to 20th century art has been greatly underestimated,” said Chaffee, the retrospective’s curator. “Her primary sculptural media were body casts, found objects and wood, which she transformed into life-sized figures and figure groups. Her combination of found elements, drawn and sculpted surfaces was entirely unique, as was her approach to presenting multiple perspectives on the same subject in a coherent yet multiplied sculptural field. This made her work instantly recognizable in an emerging field of artists experimenting with screen printing and then minimalist sculpture.”

The Party

Marisol, short for María Sol Escobar, was born in Paris in 1930 to wealthy Venezuelan parents. Her mother’s suicide when the artist was eleven years old and the family’s wealth meant that she had an unsettled childhood, living alternately in Europe, Venezuela and the United States. She eventually settled in New York and studied there.

After her mother’s death, Marisol did not speak again until she was in her early 20s and then spoke very little for the rest of her life.

In the 1960s, she was celebrated as an emerging artist of her generation. Her boxy wooden sculptures were the talk of the town. Pop culture subjects such as the Kennedy family, Andy Warhol and John Wayne, but also pieces that explored the role of women in society, gender and sexuality norms in the mid-century, self-identity, Cold War politics and the immigrant experience. The satirical and deceptively political sculptures defined Pop Art in the 1960s.

“Marisol added only enough details to give the impression of a person – a molded hand, a pointed toe, buttocks, breasts, a phallus – and left more of the figure simply suggested and unfinished than any figurative sculptor before her,” Chaffee said. “These blocky forms often recalled ancient Greek herms as well as Egyptian sculptures. They act as invitations for the viewer to complete the work and fill in the gaps. They are so effectively immersive and participatory that we don’t even realize how involved we are in looking at it.”

Numerous examples can be seen in the Buffalo retrospective, including the most famous ones from 1965 and 66. The Party.

“The Party is truly Marisol’s masterpiece of 1960s sculpture. Each of the 15 chunky figures at this ball has a version of the artist’s face as well as cast body parts, and most of the figures are dressed to the nines as if they were posing at a formal uptown party,” explains Chaffee. “The VIPs wear painted dresses and a suit as well as actual cutouts from dresses that belonged to Marisol. The maid and butler are also formally dressed.”

Appearances can be deceptive. Chaffee finds the work paradoxical.

“It’s incredibly fun to watch, and you can’t help but enjoy all the details Marisol has put into the subjects – there’s real costume jewelry, cast jewelry, and a lightbox with a photo of jewelry, for example. A central figure wears a dress that looks like it’s based on Matisse cutouts and a hairstyle/crown molded from one of Marisol’s own 1950s sculptures, but as much as it brings joy to the audience, it also doesn’t look like a fun party to go to,” she said. “Nobody really interacts with anyone else, and many of the details Marisol includes seem to suggest the visual manifestation of each character’s own personality flaws. A magazine cutout of a man’s hand is pasted onto a woman’s torso, as if it’s about to grab her breast. Everything seems to revolve around appearance in a way that’s overwhelming but fascinating to watch.”

On the back of works such as The PartyMarisol represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale in 1968. Shortly after, she withdrew from the mainstream art world, still working but unable to break into the scene. Marisol was forgotten.

Marisol comes to Buffalo

The relationship between Buffalo AKG and Marisol began in 1962 with the purchase of The Generals (1961–62) from the artist’s solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery that same year, the museum was the first institution to acquire her works. The acquisition of Baby Girl (1963) followed soon after.

From 1964 to 1993, Marisol was represented by the New York gallery of Buffalo native Sidney Janis, who promoted the artist’s career. This past seems to have inspired her decision to leave her estate to the Buffalo AKG.

“In late 2016, I had the privilege of being one of the first people to enter Marisol’s Tribeca loft after her death, along with our museum director Janne Sirén. It was immediately clear that this space belonged to someone who was fully committed to her art,” recalls Chaffee. “Aside from small living areas, every inch was filled with artwork and the tools she used to create it. Pictures pinned to the wall and books scattered throughout were reminders of her extensive travels, her love of scuba diving, the presence of her work in hundreds of exhibitions, including major shows in Venezuela and Japan, and her proximity to so many of the greatest artists of the 20th century.”

The entire building, including the attic, was donated to the museum.

“Flipping through a notebook, I found the list of attendees at her fiftieth birthday dinner in 1980. It included Edward Albee, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, Halston, Bill Katz, Ruth Kligman, Elisa Monte, Louise Nevelson, Larry Rivers, George Segal and Andy Warhol, among others,” Chaffee said. “The trust that Marisol had placed in our museum was almost unbelievable. Our museum staff then spent weeks in those spaces evaluating, photographing, inventorying and packing them. Back in Buffalo, even during the first, intense months of the COVID pandemic, our team worked – masked and in shifts – to continue cataloging, preserving and photographing her legacy, a process that is still ongoing.”

In total, there are around 600 drawings and prints, 100 sculptures, 6,000 photographs, as well as her papers, her library and her tools. The exhibition is largely based on the works that Marisol kept in her possession until the end. Each piece is a piece of the puzzle to give the artist back her rightful place in history.

“Marisol: A Retrospective” opened on October 7, 2023, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and then moved to the Toledo Museum of Art. After the presentation in Buffalo, which ends on January 6, 2025, the exhibition’s final stop will be the Dallas Museum of Art, where it will be on display from February 23 to July 6, 2025.