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"MARISOL? A Latin Garbo!" exclaimed an admirer recently.

"Marisol? She's that beautiful witch in a Charles Addams cartoon," said another.

"Marisol! The first girl artist with glamour," Pop art star Andy Warhol has proclaimed.

The object of this flourishing mystique is Marisol, an enigmatic you Venezuelan-American artist whose poetic name is now internationally known (in Spanish, it means "sea and sun"). Not only are her witty, inventive sculptures admired by big-league museums but, in this new American era of artist-as-star, she is asked to lecture by ladies' groups, gets letters from yearning teen-agers and is recognized by businessmen in night clubs.

On the New York art scene, the Marisol legend is nourished by her chic, bones-and-hollows face (elegantly Spanish with a dash of gypsy) framed by glossy black hair, her mysterious reserve and faraway, whispery voice, toneless as a sleepwalker's, but appealingly paced by a rich Spanish accent. "She can look," marvels an observer who see her often at parties, "like the stunning Marquesa of a Fellini movie--or a beatnik kid on her way to a pot party."

Though these attributes are not to be sneezed at, Marisol's real fame rests on a dazzling ability to distill art from the clichés of American life. Her subjects are simple--a summer beach scene (with bare bottoms), a pistol-packing movie cowboy on a horse, a group of joyrides out in a Ford. She portrays them by a complex method of assemblage--a single Marisol figure may have a head of wood, a plaster face, a barrel body and a pair of real shoes.


ANY resemblance between Marisol and her art is far from coincidental. In creating her characters, she is apt to incorporate her own anatomy--replicas of her face, hands, feet, ears, fingers, and derriére. Standing recently in a ticket of just-completed works at her studio, a group of 15 life-size figures called "The Party," she looked like a dreamer, surrounded by faintly sinister self-images she had summoned during sleep. The figures, mostly women, are festively gowned and coiffed, some with real clothes. They stand trance-like, their faces congealed in social masks. In the forehead of one is a small, working TV set. This midriff of another is adorned with a big, light-up slide of a diamond necklace ("Wasn't that nice? The Harry Winston people let me have it," murmurs Marisol). A butler and maid bear trays of real glasses. And not untypically, the faces, male and female are all Marisol's: pencilled Marisols, plaster Marisols, painted, photographed and carved Marisols.

This obsession-with-self-image has led critics to knowing pronouncements about narcissism, a search for identity and the like--interpretations which Marisol once accepted but now rejects with a bored smile. "It's like that movie, 'Last Year in Marienbad.' I used to love it," she says. "But people bring it up to me so often that I'm beginning to despise it. I once went along with those ideas because I had a boy friend who always talked about finding out who you were. Of course, every artist puts himself into his work. But the truth is, I use my own face because it's easier. When I want to make a face or hands for one of my figures, I'm usually the only person around to use as a model."

Her everyday subject matter and use of real objects sometimes causes critics to pigeonhole Marisol's work as Pop. But while Pop art takes its images straight from the current environment, hers reflects other influences: pre-Columbian sculpture; early American art; surrealist and dream imagery; even traces of the religious pictures she had to copy at the Catholic school she attended as a child. "Her work is a very individual, sophisticated expression in a folk art idiom," says Dorothy Miller, curator of museum collection at the Museum of Modern Art, who showed a roomful of Marisols in the museum's "Americans, 1963" exhibit.

Marisol herself acknowledges the influence of earlier art, as well as Pop, and of several individual artists (among them Robert Rauschenberg and the sculptor, William King). But she refuses to label her work. "I don't like the idea of all those groups. An artist is an artist. I have no social intention. I think about the forms, not the meaning. People think too much about subject matter in art. But whatever they want to call me is okay--Pop or anything."

She is by no means uncandid about her success. "It has happened because I have made it happen. I got tired of being nobody and going to that bar in (Continued on page 45)


GRACE GLUECK reports art news for The New York Times.