Viewing page 153 of 166

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

It's Not Pop——It's Marisol

(Continued from Page 34)

the Village [the Cedar Tavern, an artist's hang-out]. So I began to work very hard."

"Hard" is by way of an understatement. Marisol's relentless work drive is the envy and despair of her friends. "Her discipline is iron," says the painter Ruth Kligman. "Sometimes I've passed her studio at 2 A.M. and seen her there still plugging away. She doesn't get hung up on the feminine bit——the beauty parlor, shopping, the telephone and so forth. Clothes? She wears what amounts to a uniform of sweater, jeans and boots."

Marisol's day begin about noon, when she wakes in her small, surreally cluttered Murray Hill apartment and puts away a standard brunch of ham and eggs (her working dinner is invariably a hamburger). On the way to her studio, a huge loft over a men's shop on lower Broadway, she stops to buy materials——nails, glue, chair legs, barrel staves, pine planks from a lumber yard. But her particular delight is tracking down her far-out "props."

"It started as a kind of rebellion" says Marisol "everything was so serious."

They have ranged from a stuffed dogs head, bought at a taxidermists, that became part of "Women With Dog" to some tiny portrait, "Mr. Alemany." "I do my research in the Yellow Pages," she explains gleefully. "You could call them a new palette for me."

By contrast to the clutter at home, Marisol studio, a space of some 90 by 25, is stark and workmanlike. at present it is enlivened by her "party" group and a large panel, "Jazz Musicians," studded with real trumpets and a saxophone which leans against one wall. It once stood in one of her favorite discothequès, L'Interdit at the Gotham Hotel, But she reclaimed it because "everybody was bumping into it and breaking it." Above a work bench is tacked a photo clipped from a magazine of a fat complacent looking couple at a Gold water rally——who may eventually be grist for Marisol's mallet.

An expert carpenter ("I just picked it up") and carver, she works from cryptic numbered diagrams with the aid of a dew power tools, briskly sawing and hammering the barrel or boxlike bodies of her figures, ruthlessly shaping their heads with an axe, a chisel, sand paper and rasps. She can even make her own electrical installations. "But id never dream of tackling, say, a piece of furniture. That's too complicated"

This regimen is not without tonic interruptions. in fact, considering her work habits, she frequency with which Marisol appears at uptown art openings and  parties is nothing short of astonishing. Though she is sometimes alone, a frequent escort is Andy Warhol. Other recent favorites have been Sam Green, the young, square bearded director of Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art, and Heinz Mack, a German sculptor and member of the widely exhibited Group Zero.

At such festivities Marisol is celebrated for her marathon silences. A museum man was present at a brunch last year to which she had been invited. "She arrived at 11," he recalls "and didn't say a word until she left at 3. Then she apologized for not talking because she felt sleepy." An art editor remembers seeing her seated alone at a nonswinging cocktail party. He invited her to leave his group " for some place more fun," She declined. "But I'm having fun —— just watching."

"She uses her silence like a shield," says an old friend artist Conrad Marca-relli." but she seems comfortable behind it." "I don't really mind anymore," says art dealer Leo Castelli, a very articulate man who has learned to sit pleasantly with Marisol in bouts of silence lasting for an hour. "Its relaxing."

Speculating about Marisol's taciturnity recently, a friend defended it on practical grounds. "A, she's genuinely shy. B, she realizes that most people have nothing much to say. So why should she put out energy than she has to? She saves it for work. When she does say something, its direct and to the point. She puts things in their place."

In the last few years Marisol's less frequent. Eleanor Ward, Director of the Stable Gallery and, until recently, Marisol's dealer, remembers that in 1962, shortly before the one man show that brought her and apparently prompted by a feeling of release and accomplishment, proclaimed gravely, "I am talking now."

Marisol does not attempt to 

(Continued on Following Page)

MARCH 7, 1965