Marisol's Public and Private de Gaulle

Abstract

Peg De Lamater Marisol Escobar's remarkable, larger-than-life sculpture of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, belonging to the artist's Figures ofState series, is both straightforward and highly nuanced. Its appeal lies in her irreverent and perceptive blending of the public and private de Gaulle. President Charles de Gaulle is one of a number of portrait sculptures of famous people that Marisol (b. 1930) has produced since the 1960s. None of these have been commissioned, and none of the subjects sat for the artist. Instead, their likenesses have been fashioned after existing photographs. In the case of de Gaulle, Marisol's source was a picture of the general in a carriage that seemed to her to be too frail to carry its majestic burden.' One result of this method of working is a distancing from the subject; with de Gaulle, whose remote public persona was itself deliberate and legendary, this approach was especially suitable. Although Marisol used a photograph of de Gaulle as her model, she was in a position to have also had critical knowledge of the French leader. Born in Paris of Venezuelan parents, she spent her formative years there, leaving the city only in 1946, when she was sixteen, and returning again in 1948 for two years of study at the lEcole des Beaux Arts. Thus, Marisol would have witnessed de Gaulle's rise from a revered hero-soldier of the French resistance to president of the country. But it is not this period of de Gaulle's life that Marisol chose to portray here. Instead, she depicts an older de Gaulle, showing him as he was in 1967, when she made the sculpture. By this time, the seventy-seven-year-old de Gaulle was nearing the end of his career as a public figure. His autocratic style of governing was under attack, and in 1969 he would resign the presidency after a crucial vote defeated his proposals for an archaic revision of the French constitution that would have given him even greater control. Marisol's interpretation effectively subverts de Gaulle's posture of power. She shows him standing at attention, his characteristically large body erect (he was six feet, four inches tall) but compressed into a squared off, slightly ridiculous box that tapers at one end like a coffin. She enlivened the expanse of the torso, with its unbelted jacket, by slightly varying the rendering of the pocket flaps and by adding an askew necktie, as if to undermine the symmetry of the figure and to call into question the success of the general's evident concern with correctness. The symmetry is further broken by a single white hand, modeled after the artist's own, tentatively waving to an imaginary public.