Pumpkins and Marisol at DMA

 Back in 2017, we were able to see the Kusama Pumpkins at the DMA and they have made a return trip.  I did a post on the back then and here is the LINK to it.  I didn't share a lot of information then, so here is a bit more. 

"My beloved pumpkins.

My pumpkins, beloved of all the plants in the world.

When I see pumpkins, I cannot efface the joy of them being

my everything, nor the awe I hold them in.

I have captured the dignity of such pumpkins and their eternal

expression of love towards humanity here in this mirror room.

I invite you all to see tis vast, unbounded field of pumpkins

to discover how humans shall live their lives from now on.

Please unearth your own way of living life."

Yayoi Kusama

The Japanese pumpkin, or kabocha squash, has been a recurring symbol in Kusama's art since the late 1940s.  Kusama first encountered this type of pumpkin in the fields surrounding her childhood home in rural Matsumoto, Japan.  The artist strongly identifies with the pumpkin and has described her images of them as a form of self-portraiture.  She admires pumpkins for their "generous unpretentiousness" and "solid spiritual balance," as well as for their plump and pleasing form.  I simply love them as well and love this exhibit.

Our second exhibit here today is Marisol - A Retrospective. Of all the Pop artists of the 1960s, Marisol remains the most enigmatic.  Delightfully satirical and deceptively political, her sculptures cut to the heart of America's developing obsession with celebrity.  By the mid-1960s, Marisol was hailed as the female artist of her generation.  Thousands lined up to see her remarkable life-size sculptures inspired by popular culture and women's roles in society.  She became a celebrity herself, nicknamed the "Latin Garbo" for her apparent exoticism, beauty, and famous silences, and dubbed the "only girl artist with glamour" by fellow Pop artist Andy Warhol. Yet Marisol was always more than a muse or an icon of a single decade, and her nuanced work would transcend the Pop Art movement that helped bring her to prominence.

The Party - 1965-1966

When Marisol's second solo exhibition of the decade opened in New York in1964, it included The Jazz Wall.  This rare wall-based sculpture harkened back to her reliefs from the 1950s.  As she had done in the past, Marisol used casts of her own face for the piano and trumpet players.  The tenor saxophonist's face is a photograph of the musician John Haley "Zoot" Sims.  L'Interdit, a nightclub in the basement of the Gotham Hotel, loaned the sculpture for the exhibition.  Although the work was on view in the club for only a short time, it was made with this specific site in mind.  

This is Kiss - 1966.

St. Maarten - 1972

Marisol was at the height of her fame in 1968.  She represented Venezuela in a celebrated solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale and was one of only four women among 149 artists selected for that year's prestigious documenta exhibition in Kassel, Germany.  Despite her successes, Marisol grew frustrated with the United States due to its political climate.  The police response to Vietnam War protests inspired her to undertake another round of travel, this time to India, Nepal, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand.  For several months in 1969, she also took up intensive scuba diving training in Tahiti, and described the time she spent underwater as helping her become "reborn - cleansed and purified."  These impromptu travels abroad immediately following a period of great art-world success mirrored her departure for Rome a decade earlier.  In the years that followed, Marisol dove whenever she could and make hundreds of underwater photographs and films.  In 1973, she debuted the results of her engagement with marine life.  Often combining a cast of her face with the body of a fish, these works explored human-animal interdependence.

Triggerfish II - 1972

Untitled Landscape - 1970

The Funeral - 1966  Marisol's final sculptural commentary on events from the1960s.  Here, she portrays three-year-old John F. Kennedy, Jr., President John F. Kennedy's son, wo famously saluted his father's funeral procession after the president was assassinated in 1963.  She depicts the little boy on a plinth and the procession as if it were a sequence of toy soldiers.  Marisol would later remember, "I was touched by the expression on his face, a despair that usually children do not have.  I did the funeral itself small because if one looks at something from a distance it looks small.  Only in our memory do we know what size it is."

Picasso - 1977