Marisol Escobar was a French sculptor and printmaker of Venezuelan origin. A representative of several art movements, like new realism, folk art, dada and surrealism, she produced her figurative sculptural compositions from the combination of wood with other substances, for example, glass, plastic, bronze, door knobs and even shoes.
Among Escobar’s notable sculptures are ‘The Last Supper’, ‘The Party’ and ‘The Kennedy family’.
Background
Ethnicity:
Marisol Escobar's parents came from Venezuela, the federal republic in the South America.
Marisol Escobar, was born as Maria Sol Escobar on May 22, 1930, in Paris, France to a prosperous family of Gustavo Hernandez and Josefina Escobar who already had a son Gustavo. Josefina Escobar was a renowned patron of the arts in Venezuela.
Having a significant income, the family regularly travelled to Europe and United States.
Marisol Escobar revealed her interest in drawing at the age of ten and was encouraged in her passion by the parents who often brought her to the museums and art galleries. Despite painting, the young girl loved to embroider.
When Escobar was eleven-year-old, her mother committed suicide. It was a real trauma for young Marisol and she was sent by her father to the Long Island boarding school in New York City. During her one-year stint at the institution, she kept silence and talked only during the classes answering teacher’s questions. As a very religious person, after her mother’s death, Marisol walked on her knees until they bled.
In 1946, Marisol Escobar settled down in Los Angeles with her family.
Education
Marisol Escobar studied at the Otis Art Institute (currently Otis College of Art and Design) and Jepson Art Institute in Los Angeles, California, United States. Among her teachers there were Howard Warshaw and Rico Lebrun.
In 1946, she became a student of the Marymount School for Girls in the city, but in a couple of years, she changed the institution to the Westlake School for Girls.
Three years later, Marisol took brief art lessons at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France. The following year, the young artist came to New York City where she pursued her artistic training at the Art Students League.
Later, in 1951, she enrolled at the New School for Social Research and spent there three years. While at the School, she also attended art classes led by the artist Hans Hofmann.
Thereafter, during her lifetime, Marisol Escobar obtained several honorary degrees, in particular, Doctor of Fine Arts from Moore College of Art and Design in 1969, from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1992 and the Doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence in 1986.
Marisol Escobar started her career with paintings and drawings which she made in different styles. By the early 1950s, the artist shifted to her further well-known wooden sculptures often representing groups of people, like families, friends or public personalities. The debut solo exhibition of Escobar took place in 1957 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City. It provided her with great success.
In 1961, Marisol participated in the exhibition 'The Art of Assemblage' held in the New York Museum of Modern Art. The beginning of the new decade was also marked for the artist by the involvement in the Pop art movement. She met its notable representatives among whom were Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol. The latter turned Escobar in a couple of his movies titled The Kiss and 13 Most Beautiful Girls. The following years, Marisol had several solo successful shows, including the Stable Gallery in New York City in 1964. In four years, she presented her wooden compositions at the Venice Biennale. The period was the top of the artist’s career.
During the subsequent decades, Marisol Escobar continued to depict famous personalities, like Charles de Gaulle, Lyndon B. Johnson or her colleagues Marcel Duchamp and Georgia O’Keeffe. These totem-like wooden portraits were satirical, sometimes sensible and not exactly corresponded to the pure Pop art. In fact, Marisol Escobar herself didn’t like to be classified as the representative of any art style.
Achievements
Marisol Escobar was an accomplished artist and sculptor who developed her female vision of the Pop art, somehow sentimental and sensible unlike this of the male artists. That’s why she was often excluded from the rest of Pop adherents. Nevertheless, her artistic talent was widely recognized in the 1960s and rediscovered in the 21st century.
Escobar was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and received such prestigious awards as the Gabriela Mistral Inter-American Prize for Culture and the Paez Medal of Art (bestowed posthumously).
Marisol Escobar became a central figure of many retrospectives dedicated to her art in the 21st century. In 2004, her artworks were demonstrated during the exhibition of Latin American artists at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The huge retrospective was also organized in 2014 at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis, Tennessee.
Some of her artworks can be found at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Toledo Museum of Art and others. The huge collection of Escobar’s masterpieces is nowadays preserved at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, United States.
Portrait of Sidney Janis Selling Portrait of Sidney Janis
From France
Indian
The Kiss
Magritte II
Picasso
My mom and I
Acrobats
Printer's Box
The Bathers
Portrait of Willem de Kooning
Andy
Portrait of Martha Graham
Portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe with Antelope
The Party
Religion
Marisol Escobar was a spiritual woman. She began to take interest in religion and faith when she was a young girl.
Views
Marisol Escobar's sculptures criticized the modern life in a satiric way. She often used her face, hair or even the whole body in her sculptural compositions to show that women deserved to have their own place in the artistic world inspite of the biased attitude to them as artists.
Quotations:
"I was born an artist. Afterwards, I had to explain to everyone what that meant."
"I have always been very fortunate. People like what I do."
Membership
American Academy Arts and Letters
,
United States
1978
Personality
Marisol Escobar insisted that perseverance and hard work could lead the artist to acclaim. She believed in herself and in her artistic destination.
Although her strong character and independence, the artist was witty and charismatic.
The silence was an essential element of her life and art. Marisol never wasted words and rarely talked about her profession.
Quotes from others about the person
"Marisol inherited some of the features of this tradition [the Ashcan School and Comics] by way of her training under Howard Warshaw and Yasuo Kaiyoshi." Albert Boimes, art historian and author
"She is an artist capable of creating both a wonderful parody of the macho ideal represented by John Wayne and a reverent homage to South African Bishop Desmond Tutu." Eleanor Heartney, author
