The Dollmaker

Most girls outgrow their dolls, but a sculptress named Marisol is an exception. She has made her dolls grow up with her. One 7-ft. 4-in. figure, Baby Boy, even clutches a small doll, with Marisol's features, in his gigantic fist. Her lifesized, deadpan puppets in brightly painted wood mock and mime the postures of people whom she meets (see opposite page).

At 35, Marisol, with her Latin Garbo looks, is an avant-garde celebrity in her own right. She has co-starred in Andy Warhol's film of uninterrupted osculation, The Kiss, and shown up at black-tie museum openings wearing such outfits as a silver snakeskin pants suit. But for all the splash she makes, Marisol is a mystery.

Born in Paris of Venezuelan parents, Marisol (means "sea and sun" in Spanish) dropped her last name, Escobar, as too masculine-sounding. She came to the U.S. in 1950, settled in Manhattan, and studied with Hans Hofmann. She speaks in the shy monotone whisper of wind wafting through Spanish moss, seems always to be peeking around the corners of her long black hair with nearly expressionless stealth, and only the keenest humor will send a smile rippling across her lips. It is the same face that appears again and again in her art, penciled on wood, cast in plaster, even peeping from a pasted-on photograph. "Some people have accused me of narcissism," she says, "but it is really easier to use myself as a model."

Marisol multiplies throughout her recently finished The Party, a group of 15 figures frozen in an elegant trance as if they were creatures in a dollhouse awaiting the touch of a magic wand to bring them to life. As their fairy godmother, Marisol makes them in her own image. She juxtaposes two-and three-dimensional images, real glasses with the painted tux of a three-faced butler, even installing a tiny, working transistor television set in the forehead of a female figure. For The Visit, she left something more of herself, putting her own purse--minus only her keys and wallet--into the playful setting.

Yet Marisol's dolls are not just witty toys. Although her art has been mistaken for pop, she is actually more the "wise primitive." She naturally admires the work of the Douanier Rousseau, as well as African, pre-Columbian and early American sculpture. Her statues can also suggest the hex of voodoo, and she admits, "Sometimes I get scared by my own work." She knows the primitive idea that making likenesses of people gives the maker power over them. "If I have a boy friend who has been nasty to me," says Marisol, "I will make a sculpture of him--maybe as a duck. But I don't do that to those who are nice to me."

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