'Marisol and Warhol Take New York' is taking Pittsburgh

The decade of the 1960s brought with it a pop culture explosion that enveloped music, fashion, film and visual art.

In one sonic boom, a new multi-dimensional world of creation opened up and two artists in particular — Venezuelan-American Marisol Escobar, otherwise known simply as Marisol, and Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol — contributed mightily to that perception.

The exhibition “Marisol and Warhol Take New York” recently opened at The Andy Warhol Museum on the North Side. The museum claims it is the first to explore the close friendship and working relationship shared by Marisol and Warhol, the latter famous for well beyond 15 minutes, and the former, seemingly forgotten.

It’s a safe bet that many well-informed art lovers have never heard of Marisol, a sculptor whose revolutionary style involves flat, painted surfaces and additional elements, including plaster castings. As the ‘60s wore on, her star, having risen rapidly in the early part of the decade, began to fade — some characterize it as her being written out of the white male-dominated pop narrative.

Marisol died in relative obscurity in New York in 2016. She was 85.

The exhibition charts their early successes and the shared themes in their work between 1960 and 1968.

“Although Marisol and Warhol overlapped for eight years and shared many parallel themes in their work, Warhol’s name is now synonymous with Pop, while Marisol’s was nearly eradicated from the American Pop history books,” said Jessica Beck, the Warhol’s Milton Fine curator of art. It was Beck’s vision that made the Marisol and Warhol exhibition happen.

“Over time, her work became marginalized, existing merely as a footnote to the movement that she inspired and shaped. This exhibition seeks to rewrite that history by recovering the artistic vision and singular voice of a woman whose legacy has been overlooked.”

A photo on display of Marisol and Warhol has them looking thick as thieves as they pose in front of the Empire State Building. They developed their friendship as they came to be identified with the Pop art movement, often featuring one another as subjects in their work.

The exhibition also includes some of Warhol’s earliest films, including silent shorts in both black-and-white and color, with Marisol as the subject. Many have never been seen before and include “Marisol-Stop Motion,” an intriguing silent 1964, 16mm, 3-minute black-and-white film.

We see that Warhol is clearly infatuated with Marisol’s dark, intense and exotic look. In turn, Marisol made a sculptural portrait of Warhol in the early 1960s, called “Andy,” that captures a period of his life when he was transitioning from loafer-wearing commercial artist to emerging solo artist. The piece includes a pair of Warhol’s actual shoes.

Beck said the early works of Marisol on display demonstrate her influence on Warhol’s early career.

“Few people know and understand how wildly popular Marisol’s work was in the early 1960s and how central she was to this explosive period in American art,” she said. “This exhibition will change that by giving contemporary audiences the opportunity to see the power of her work today.”

Beck admits to not knowing much about Marisol herself before doing her research. She learned that Marisol was 11 years old and living with her family in Paris when her mother committed suicide. Her father moved Marisol and her brother back to Caracas, Venezuela, but Marisol would end up going back to Paris to study art and moved from there to New York.

“It’s interesting to me that (she became) part of this mix of influential artists that Warhol is following at this point in his career,” Beck said. “What I tried to show is that Marisol Escobar is one of these contributing artists.”

The exhibition highlights shared themes in the artists’ works including iconic Pop subjects of Coca-Cola and the Kennedy family. In addition to showing more than 100 works from the Warhol’s permanent collection, it has secured some of Marisol’s sculptures on loan from major institutions such as MoMA, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and the Israel Museum.

“Marisol and Warhol Take New York” is on display at The Andy Warhol Museum from now until Feb. 14, 2022.