Art Review: Marisol Retrospective At The Buffalo AKG Art Museum

A Fascinating Exhibit Remembers ‘The Forgotten Star of Pop Art‘

Author’s Note: This review was originally published in The Buffalo Hive, where I serve as Managing Editor.

If one takes in the Buffalo AKG Museum’s expansive and comprehensive “Marisol” exhibit armed only with a little biographical information, it might be easy to mistake the artist as a privileged, celebrity dilettante rather than the free-spirited iconoclast she was: an important artist who produced a complex body of work filled with humanity reflecting her unique, sophisticated vision of the world.

Marisol (1930-2016) was the scion of a wealthy Venezuelan family whose tremendous oil wealth obviated any need to earn a living. Although she was formally trained, she walked out of Paris’ famed École Des Beaux Arts in 1949 after only a year of study, frustrated by a curriculum that consisted of copying the work of the masters.

She moved to New York in 1950, where she became associated with the burgeoning Abstract Expressionist movement, hanging around Greenwich Village’s Cedar Tavern with…