From France

In 1961, the Museum of Modern Art hosted an influential and landmark exhibition titled “The Art of Assemblage.” The works in the show came from an array of well-established masters like Picasso, Breton, Braque and Schwitters, as well as from younger and lesser-known artists, including Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Indiana and, notably, Marisol. Her contribution, From France, was created just one year prior in 1960. The sculpture depicts a pair of tourists who have just returned from travels to France with, in her own words, “a kiss and a handshake” (Marisol quoted in N. Grove, Magical Mixtures: Marisol Portrait Sculpture, Washington, D.C., 1991, p. 15). As she did with many of her sculptures in the 1960s, Marisol used plaster casts of herself for parts of the figures—partially for pragmatic purposes (“I don’t charge myself anything”) and partially as an artistic means of self-identity (Ibid., p. 15). The sculpture’s composition of everyday objects—carved and painted wood, a baby shoe, glass eyes—demonstrate Marisol’s incorporation of irony and absurdity into her own art of assemblage a practice not far removed from the father of the “Ready-made,” Marcel Duchamp. Her subject matter, though, which reveals an ability to depict figures with acumen and as an extension portray some facet of herself, places her in a unique category that surpasses the pure drollery of her Surrealist forefather. “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,” (G. Segal quoted in Ibid, p. 9).