Skip to Content

The Family

Showing 1 of 1


  FILTER RESULTS
Image of

© Estate of Marisol / Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.


The Family

1963
wood, metal, graphite, textiles, paint, plaster and other accessories
79 1/2 x 63 x 73 in. (202 x 160 x 185 cm)
Henry Melville Fuller Fund, 2005.12

Marisol
Venezuelan-American
1930–2016

ON VIEW

Marisol Escobar’s The Family takes a satirical look at the American family of the 1960s. In this multi-figure, free-standing sculpture, a stylish mother smiles mindlessly with a pillbox hat pulled snugly over her eyes, literally blinded by her fashion accessory and distracted from attending to the four children that surround - and confine - her. The male head of this family stands adjacent to his wife and is the only figure attached to the wall, encased in a tomb-like wooden panel and physically isolated from his wife and children. The effect suggests the trappings of this man’s and woman’s place in society and creates a schism in the idealized family popularized in such mid-century media as the television show Leave it to Beaver. Marisol expands upon her witty take on the American family by putting child-sized adults in the baby carriage. The Family shows Marisol at her best, using humor to interrogate the reality behind the American Dream. In 1970 Time magazine featured The Family on its cover to illustrate "The U.S. Family: Help!", an article that lamented the demise of traditional family structures and shifting gender roles in contemporary America.

Marisol’s focus on the complexities of post-WWII American society aligned with the interests of Pop artists, who incorporated imagery from popular culture and mined the new, postwar social, economic, and cultural landscape. While Marisol was in dialogue with a Pop aesthetic, and even starred in Andy Warhol’s film Kiss in 1963, she drew on a variety of artistic sources for inspiration, including Cubism and pre-Columbian and South American folk art. Marisol integrated these diverse influences and crafted her own distinct artistic language. Sculptor George Segal, Marisol’s contemporary, commented that "Marisol’s art has always had wit, but she’s dead serious. She brings a complexity to her work, which has a sobering gravity. She’s an original."(1)

Marisol’s original creations often feature self-portraits. In The Family, the centrally positioned daughter in a red dress carries a doll with Marisol’s face drawn on it. Other examples include The Wedding (1962), in which one Marisol marries another Marisol, and Dinner Date (1962), where one Marisol eats dinner with another Marisol. In The Party (1966), thirteen life-sized figures all have Marisol’s countenance. Marisol explained this repeated use of her self-portrait: "I did a lot of self-portraits then [1960s] because it was a time of searching for one’s identity. I looked at my faces, all different in wood, and asked, Who am I?"(2)

Born to Venezuelan parents in France in 1930, Marisol came to New York City in 1950 to attend art school and pursue a career as an artist. From 1951 to 1954, Marisol studied at the renowned painting school established by abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, but soon after her tenure there began working with three-dimensional forms after exposure to William King’s cartoon-like, carved wood sculptural figures and a visit to a gallery featuring stylized, pre-Columbian sculptures.(3) Marisol’s first forays into three-dimensions resulted in small figural groups in clay, which she quickly abandoned for bronze and then wood, which would become her preferred medium.

In 1963, the year Marisol made The Family, the Museum of Modern Art, New York featured several of Marisol’s sculptures in Americans, a group exhibition designed to highlight relatively unknown, but promising artists. Internationally recognized artists Richard Anuszkiewicz, Lee Bontecou, Claes Oldenburg, and James Rosenquist were among the artists Marisol exhibited alongside.

The Currier purchased The Family at auction in 2005, before which time it was on long-term loan to the Milwaukee Art Museum from the Robert B. Mayer Family Collection.

AW

NOTES

(1) Gardner, Paul. "Who is Marisol?" Art News, vol. 88, no. 5 (May 1989): 148.
(2) Ibid., 150.
(3) "Marisol" Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, NY (2001): 11.

REFERENCES

Barry, Edward. "The Art of Marisol: Intriguing Objects Fashioned of Wood" Chicago Tribune, (Dec 22,
1965).

Gardner, Paul. "Who is Marisol?" Art News, vol. 88, no. 5 (May 1989): 147-151.

Heartney, Eleanor. Marisol (Purchase, NY: Neuberger Museum of Art, 2001).

Judge, Catherine M. Marisol (Venezuela: Instituto Nacional de Cultura Y Bellas Artes, 1968).

Pacina, Marina. "Tracking Marisol in the Fifties and Sixties" Archives of American Art Journal,
vol. 46, no. 3-4 (Fall 2007): 60-65.


Exhibition
1965-1966 Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, IL, "Marisol: Impressions." Dec. 14, 1965 - Jan. 12, 1966; cat. no. 16.

1975-2005 Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, Extended loan.

1976 David Alfred Smart Gallery, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, "Contemporary Art from the Robert B. Mayer Collection." Jan. 21 - Mar. 15, cat. no. 45.

1998 Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI, "From Figure to Floor: Sculpture in the 20th Century." Sept . - Nov., cat. no. 39.

2021-2022 The Andy Warhol Museum, "Marisol and Warhol Take New York." Oct. 14, 2021-Feb. 14, 2022; Perez Museum of Art, April 13 - Sept. 4, 2022. (not shown at the Perez)

Provenance
Stable Gallery, New York, NY
Purchased by the Robert B. Mayer Family Collection, January 4, 1963
Sotheby's, New York, NY, lot 14, May 10, 2005
Purchased by Currier Museum of Art, 2005

Additional Images
Additional Image


Your current search criteria is: Object is "The Family".