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THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 1964.
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ONE APPROACH——Robert Motherwell's "Pancho Villa Dead or Alive," exhibited at the New School Art Center.

MARISOL: THE ENIGMA OF THE SELF-IMAGE
By BRIAN O'DOHERTY

THE Marisol exhibition at the Stable Gallery, 33 East 74th Street, is full of Marisols —— plaster Marisols, photographed Marisols, wooden Marisols——and it was being haunted by Marisol herself in person. She drifted around in a loose gray sweater, blue jeans tucked into high boots, touching up her new exhibition —— which runs from a huge John Wayne (looking like a male hormone in jackboots) to two monstrous children over 7 feet tall, each holding a doll with Marisol's face.

Her exhibition——which marks a giant step forward in her power, subtlety and seriousness as an artist——is a frozen "Marienbad" full of puzzled self-images at different ages and in different roles. Marisol finds it easier to make art out of herself than to talk about herself.

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"Baby Boy" holds Marisol.

She refuses to join you in contemplating her own mystery, but remains an island, sometimes distant, sometimes close, according to the conversational weather. But always separate. "Why is my own face one of my preoccupations? Because I can't find out what I look like."

A widely multiplied enigma, Marisol is also an enigma to herself. Sometimes she sees herself sharp-featured and high-fashion, sometimes blunted and round, the face set in an Egyptian tunnel of hair, occasionally as a woman out walking with four faces looking simultaneously in all directions. Her face is open and yet closed. She keeps her large dark eyes fixed on you. When puzzled she rubs her lower lip with the back of her little finger. Her dialogue is Pinteresque.

"Who do you like?"
"????"
"Artists, I mean?"
"I like them all."
"Do you like Pop?"
"Bob?"
"Pop."
"Yes, I like Pop."
"What beautiful women do you identify with?"
"With nobody."
"Do you have a sense of humor?"
"Yes."
"Do you want your work interpreted as satire?"
"I don't care what they think." Pause. "I don't think much myself. When I don't think all sort of things come to me."
"What sort of things?"
"Ideas. Like the big babies" (The huge 7-footers).
"Did you think of Goya's 'Saturn' when you did them?"
"No."
"Do you ever go mad, break things, use bad language?"
"Very rarely."
"You don't like to talk about your work?"
"I don't know what to say."
"Do you go to much theater?'
"No, I never go. It makes me nervous."
"Do you like movies?"
"Yes."
"'Marienbad'?"
"It is my favorite. I even copied some of the gestures in it, the hand of the man who played with the match boxes. And 'Mondo Cane.' That's where I got my dog from." She has constructed a small dog to accompany four Marisols (three adults, one child) out on a walk.

All this is much less cool than it sounds, for Marisol is far from dead-pan. The questions go inward with an almost physical impact through the extraordinary waiting face, with arched nostrils, slim Spanish nose, high cheekbones, all emerging from a streamlined inky wave of hair. It is a face uncovered by her concentration; the small subtle changes produce large effects. At times she is as dark and slicingly remote as a bullfighter, sometimes vulnerably female, and when she smiles it is like watching someone come out of a tunnel. Since words seem to be a form of direct experience that is painful to her, conversation with her is an extraordinarily bare experience. Like Jeanne Moreau, she frequently has one of the great properties of the legend-provoking female —— the magnetic asexuality of an exceptionally beautiful woman who makes absolutely no concessions to her beauty.

Marisol's vital statistics are sparing. She was born in Paris 33 years ago and has been traveling since. Her childhood was spent in Europe and Venezuela. Her parents were business people; they had nothing to do with art. She has one brother, an economist. She doesn't like Venezuela or Europe, where she spent 18 months in Rome. She has never been to Spain because she thought it would be like Venezuela. She came to New York in 1950, went briefly to the Art Students League an then to Hans Hofmann.

"How did you paint then?"
"Like a Hans Hofmann student. The sculpture? I picked it up on my own."

Her virtuosity is astonishing. The show is a compendium of people (personal friends, including Andy Warohl [[Warhol]]), environments and events —— people dancing, out for an automobile ride, at a restaurant with food painted on to the table, a wedding, with Marisol —— the bride —— marrying Marisol —— the bridegroom. One can assemble a catalogue of real objects —— lots of shoes, a couch, a handbag, a mandolin, saxophone and trumpet from a jazz group with a vague cousinship to Picasso's "Three Musicians."

Everything has been hauled into a sawed-up, hammered world where reality and abstraction, objects and their painted images, statement and suggestion all lock into a solid kaleidoscope in which her face appears and disappears like a mute obsession, never smiling, a mystery like Garbo.

Watching her going through her exhibition, constantly meeting her own image, I asked her if she had ever met her doppelgänger, that ghostly projection of oneself that one can meet face to face. At last she said, "I saw myself once, one evening while lying in bed, a shadow flying through the air, like a silhouette, a cut-out, front face."

"Were you terrified?"
"Yes."

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TETE-A-TETE——Marisol joins three images of herself at her show at Stable Gallery.