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Castelli exhibited in a group show.  Then her art took a giant step forward. At the Marca-Rellis' East Hampton home she was beguiled by some hat forms that she found in a sack.  Their scale suggested life-size sculpture, and with them she made some highly successful experimental figures.  That led to her working in large-scale forms.  Though by this time Marisol had acquired a reputation among New York art professionals, she was unknown to the wider public.  In 1962 her first exhibition of the new work took place at the Stable Gallery.  There were a number of show stoppers: among them, a partitioned glass-fronted box holding a hundred Marisol faces, a masterpiece of a portait group called "The Kennedys" a gnarled and grainy wooden beam adorned with a slyly painted Mona Lisa, a barrel-shanked horse bearing two 18th-century generals, and "The Family," a tableu of a dustbowl farm family.  "The wit and imagination were fantastic," remembers critic Tom Hess, executive editor of Art News.  The show, and Marisol, becamethe season's smash hits.  "Word spread like wildfire," Eleanor Ward recalls.  "After a couple of days you could hardly walk through the gallery.  Pepole showed up who weren't even art lovers, just curiosity seekers.  They'd punch each other and say, "There's Marisol!" when she appeared."  Museums began to move in.  The Museum of Modern Art bought "The Family" almost immediately.  "The Generals" was snapped up by Buffalo's savvy Albright-Knox Art Gallery. And big-time collectors appeared on the scene.   The next year she rated a room to herself at the museum of modern art exibit "Americans, 1963."  When her 1964 show was unveild at the Stable last March, no one needed to be told who Marisol was.  Viewers streamed into the gallery by the hundreds daily to see work that was even more powerfull and inventive: "Curch Wedding," in which Marisol figured as the bride, and bridegroom; a penetrating, four-sided portrait of Andy Warhol, and "The Babies," a pair of hateful giant infants, each seven feet high and holding a miniature Marisol doll.   Preparing for a show next fall at the Sidney Janis Gallery (where her work sells for up to $7,500), Marisol is rumored to be working on portrait tableau called "Four Dealers."  She finds time to make the rounds of galleries and keep very much in touch with the current art scene, though she is not particularly interested in the trends.   "I don't think it's necessary to keep up all the time.  It makes me nervous to think that critics and museum people always expect artists to be doing something new.  Why must one style go out at the expense of another?  Abstract expressionism is still fresh, de Kooning is producing beutiful paintings right now.  I don't feel you have to belong to a little group and then say everything not part of it is bad."   Her chief recreation, Marisol admits, is party-going.  "I'm really a city person.  I don't do anything else."  She has found time, though, to appear in a couple of Andy Warhol Pop movies: "The Kiss," in which she holds a three-minute oscularity pose with Pop artist Harold Stevenson, and the more recent "13 Beautiful Girls," sharing the limelight with such social types as Baby Jane Holzer and Isabel Eberstadt, art collecter Ethel Scull, model Ivy Nicholson and actress Sally Kirkland Jr.   Marisol says she enjoys watching Warhol's relentlessly drawn-out movies for "about a half hour."  She no longer goes to big-screen cinima.  "It bores me," she complains.  "I find real pepole more interesting than sitting in a dark room with imaginary ones.  Besides, there's too much distortion, those huge faces on the screen frighten me.  But I saw "Tiny Alice" and think I'm getting interested in the theater again."

ONE imperative current project is the obtaining of her United States citizenship, lack of which barred her from exhibiting with the American contingent at Brazil's prestigious 1963 São Paulo Bienal.  "I used to think it wasn't important what country you belonged to," she says.  To avoid any future such hinderance she has put in her citizenship application, and has been known to beard influential people at parties who might be able to help speed the process.   A bit wistfully, Marisol says that success has not really changed her life.  She has not yet married, but, like most career girls, would consider it "if the right man came along" ("I can't quite see myself washing diapers, but I'm at the stage where I could hire someone to do that").  She is not, however, worried about the future.  "It dosn't make any real difference wether I continue to be successful.  If one artist that you respect says he likes your work, that's the important thing.  I could go on working even unrecognized."  She probably won't ever have to.  Though fashions in art change rapidly these days, Marisol's work has high survival value.

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE