The Museo Casa Natal Picasso rescues Marisol Escobar, the forgotten queen of pop art

The Museo Casa Natal Picasso now presents the exhibition Ni Musas Ni Modelos (Neither Muses Nor Models), which vindicates Escobar, whose work Saco La Lengua (I Stick Out My Tongue) is the image of the exhibition, and another thirty artists such as Dorothea Tanning and Helen Frankenthaler. But let's return to Escobar.

Her mother's suicide when Marisol was barely eleven years old created a wall between her and the world that she never fully broke down. Her reaction to the tragedy was silence. Literally: she barely spoke until she was in her twenties. That drama and her subsequent condition as a mute child and adolescent forged a peculiar way of observing reality, of looking at the world.

Her unhappy family history contrasted with her economic privilege. Born into a wealthy Venezuelan family, she grew up in Paris and lived between Caracas, the United States and Europe, which also allowed her to train at the Otis Art Institute and the Jepson Art Institute in Los Angeles, to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts and to receive private lessons at various public schools in New York from instructors such as Hans Hofmann, himself a teacher of Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner.

Her American adventure, after a dangerous flirtation with drugs that went on for several years, led her to meet Andy Warhol in the early 1960s. She was then much more famous than he was, the queen of pop art. She had exhibited at MoMA and was frequently featured in publications such as Time, Life and the New York Times. Warhol, dazzled by her magnetism and enigmatic halo, called her "the Latin Garbo", the first artist "with glamour".

Paradoxically, the passage of time has often reduced her to Warhol's muse, she who always tried to demolish the patriarchal construction of history. That is why her inclusion in the exhibition at the Casa Natal, under a title that combats the classic stereotype of muses and models, redresses in a way that old injustice.

Even then she was attracted to science fiction and sculpture, a fascination transferred to her unique combinations of drawn and carved surfaces, body casts and other objects that were soon praised by critics and collectors. Then came the portraits, always satirical, provocative and she became a celebrity: thousands of people queued to see her exhibitions. But her art was not inoffensive. Criticism of convention and gender roles was a constant in her work, which challenged gender and sexuality norms, police repression, Cold War politics and the treatment of immigrants.

She continued to travel, visited India and different parts of Southeast Asia, learned to dive until she found underwater her greatest refuge beyond art, far from a world that always seemed too constricting, a corset that was too tight. On her return, things had changed. The market and the official narrative of pop art, dominated by men, did not sit well with her feminist and critical gaze. She didn't mind too much.

Far from striving to maintain her status, she became obsessed with pre-Columbian art. Her popularity waned until she fell into obscurity, into the silence that gave rise to it all. She died ten years ago, well into her eighties and a prey to Alzheimer's disease. The Guardian defined her as "the forgotten star of pop art", the woman who could have been everything but preferred silence.