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older 10th Street idols-Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Larry Rivers, et al.-participated in shows to lend moral support. At the time Abstract Expressionism, the first real "American" art, was in its heyday and its downtown practitioners were full of clan esprit. "There was a Great Consciousness about being an artist," one participant recalls. "The activity colored your whole life. It was almost a morality."

Comparing those days with the current art scene, in which artists are hotly pursued by the public, the press, uptown society, new tycoons and even the White House, she is fondly reminiscent. "It was quite exciting then. We were just an art group-the rest of the world seemed very far away. I didn't mind. But [characteristically] I like the way things are now, too."

A mischievous "put-on" that Marisol once staged has become a downtown legend. She was invited to take part in a panel discussion at a meeting of The Club, a kind of loose-knit artists' group that flourished for a decade in the Village, beginning in 1949.

"The four male panelists," recalls artist Al Hansen, who was there, "were dressed like kids looking for a hob in a bank. But Marisol showed up wearing a stark white mask, decorated in Japanese style, tied on with strings. The club members were apt to bully young unknowns unmericifully. The panel no sooner got under way than people began to stamp and holler, 'Take off that goddam mask! Let's see your face!'

"When the noise got deafening, Marisol undid the strings. The mask slipped off to reveal her face, made up exactly like it. What a stunt! It's something only she would think of, and it brought down the house."

In the fall of 1957 Marisol had her first uptown show, at the Leo Castelli Gallery. Her carved wooden creatures and small-scale family groups were prototypes of the things she was later to do with far more daring and invention. The show brought a small flurry of attention from the press, and Marisol shortly thereafter took off for a lengthy sojourn in Rome. Her reasons were complex. "For one, I got scared," she says. "I thought, when you start getting publicity, you lose everything you have." (She has since found this not to be  true.) She also says that she wanted to find "a better way of life-a more relaxed and happier one."

More relaxed and happier, she returned early in the 1960 with some small bronzes that

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