Table for two

Yale University Art Gallery

Dinner Date was first shown in a New York gallery in 1964. Today it’s one of the most beloved artworks in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. View full image

The Stable Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the place to be in February and March of 1964, when the Venezuelan-American artist Marisol’s sculpture Dinner Date (1963) debuted in a show of her latest work. The gallery was one of the city’s most important venues for contemporary art, and the 32-year-old artist had become a pop culture phenomenon. Upwards of 2,000 people came through the gallery each day, drawn to Marisol’s trademark approach of blending portraiture (often self-portraiture) with folk-art–inspired combinations of wood blocks, brightly colored paint, and everyday objects.

Dinner Date was installed in the Stable Gallery among other evocative sculptural tableaux, including a car full of young people, two adult-sized babies, and a five-piece jazz ensemble. Many of the individual figures had the face of the artist.

Dinner Date portrayed her visage twice, one drawn onto the wood and the other, roughly carved. These two Marisols gazed straight ahead, seated at adjacent sides of a table, seemingly uninterested in the pair of TV dinners painted realistically on the table before them. Found objects, including two sets of modeled plaster hands—one of which clenched an ordinary dinner fork—and a pair of worn cowboy boots, added a lifelike sensibility to the scene. For Marisol, self-portraiture served as a means by which she could better understand herself. “I did a lot of self-portraits [in the 1960s] because it was a time of searching for one’s identity,” she explained. “I looked at all my faces, all different in wood, and asked, Who am I?”

Marisol was born into a Venezuelan family living in Paris in 1930 and grew up first between that city and Caracas, later moving to Los Angeles. Originally named María Sol Escobar, she publicly adopted the nickname coined by her mother (a coupling of the Spanish for “sea” and “sun”) when she started exhibiting her work in the late 1950s. Her unusual name, along with a traumatic childhood (following the suicide of her mother), a consequent shyness, and a striking appearance to which journalists frequently referred, contributed to a mythology around Marisol that developed in tandem with her success.

The work Marisol produced in the 1960s defies easy art-historical categorization, which has led to her career remaining always a little outside of the dominant narrative. Her references to celebrity (for example, a portrait of her good friend Andy Warhol that also debuted in the Stable Gallery show) and to consumer culture (such as the TV dinners, and elsewhere, Coca Cola), as well as her use of found objects, shared some common ground with Pop Art. But her approach to woodworking had more to do with folk art than with Pop’s attention to a world shaped by television and advertising, and her portraits were more earnest.

The popularity of Marisol’s work in these years was well-suited to her interests. Accessibility and approachability were important to an artist who had abandoned abstract painting in favor of sculpture after having been inspired by the styles of untrained artists from Pre-Hispanic, Mexican, and American folk traditions. Looking back in 1975, she explained, “My idea was to work for everybody, because I saw that art had become such a highbrow thing—just for a few people.” After her great commercial success in the 1960s, Marisol’s career took a marked turn when she retreated from the New York art scene and spent extended periods abroad. In 1973, after traveling in India, Thailand, and Tahiti, she staged a surprising show at New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery of wood sculptures of fish that were even more like folk art, and that related to her recent experiences with scuba diving. While she continued to make art throughout her life (she died in 2016), it forever remained quite separate from currents in the New York art world, making the 1960s a short-lived period of alignment between her work and the mainstream.

Today, Dinner Date is among the most beloved artworks in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. Through next spring, it is on loan to a major Marisol retrospective, which argues for a reassessment of the artist’s legacy, and for the importance of her oeuvre as a whole. The exhibition, which was organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly the Albright-Knox Art Gallery), and travels to the Dallas Museum of Art this spring, offers the chance to consider Dinner Date and other works from this period, some six decades on, in a fresh and expansive telling of Marisol’s long career.