Rosalyn Drexler, Renowned Pop Artist and Versatile Innovator, Passes Away at 98

Polymathic artist Rosalyn Drexler — Pop Art icon, Emmy-winning screenwriter, and one-time wrestler — passed away at her home in New York yesterday, September 3, at age 98. Her death was confirmed by Garth Greenan Gallery, which represented her for a decade.

In the 1960s, Drexler developed what would become her signature painting process. She sourced images from posters, magazines, and other pop cultural print media, which she then arranged and enlarged on sheets of paper, before gluing them to canvas and painting over them in bright colors. Her paintings from then through the ’80s probe gender and power as performed in pop culture.

Perhaps related to her successful career in writing — she notably penned the novelistic adaptation of the film Rocky (1976) under a pseudonym — narrative and character were a particular focus. She captured her protagonists, often men in suits or swooning women, mid-action — a slap, a kiss — against abstracted color fields. The resulting paintings are compositionally masterful, with the clean lines of a movie poster charged with the psychologically unsettling undertones of a Rorschach test.

Her 1963 work “Love and Violence,” for instance, resembles a film reel spliced into a Mondrian painting: Orthogonal lines divide blocks of primary colors, inside which play out scenes like a woman recoiling from a man’s possessive hand clamped under her chin. As critic John Yau wrote in a 2017 review for Hyperallergic, “She brought a lively imagination to bear on the banal and absurd images that dominate our lives … and made them into something to contemplate.”

Drexler was born in 1926 in the Bronx, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. Attending the vivid spectacle of vaudeville shows and playing with art posters, books, and coloring sets were among her early artistic influences. She majored in voice at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, now the LaGuardia High School of Music and the Arts, and went on to attend Hunter College for a single semester before marrying her husband, figurative expressionist painter Sherman Drexler, in 1946. He died in 2014, leaving behind a body of paintings of which she is often the subject.

In the late ’40s, the couple lived in Berkeley, California, where Drexler began making assemblage sculptures out of found scrap metal and wood. By 1951, the couple had moved to Hell’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s west side, near a gym where professional women wrestlers practiced. She became a wrestler herself under an alter ego, whom Andy Warhol captured in a series of silkscreen paintings, Album of the Mat Queen (c. 1962–63). She would go on to write a critically acclaimed book in 1972 based on her time both in the ring and in the art world, To Smithereens, which was republished by Hagfish earlier this year.

Drexler built a rich social life in New York. She frequented the now-shuttered Cedar Tavern, a legendary hotspot for artists; counted Franz Kline and Elaine and Willem de Kooning among her close friends; and participated in the Happenings. She was represented by Reuben Gallery, which closed after a year in 1961, and Korn Blee Gallery from 1964 to ’66, and showed in group exhibitions at spaces like Pace, in addition to penning nine novels and 10 plays.

Still, she did not achieve the same recognition as her male peers, whether because of her gender, the subject matter she was drawn to, or both. Indeed, a political awareness underpinned Drexler’s life and art: In a 1971 conversation with Elaine de Kooning published in response to Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” she said, “I don’t think it’s ridiculous for women to demand that they be represented in equal numbers at the Whitney. You have to start somewhere.”

Toward the end of her life, Drexler finally began to receive her due. A 2007 survey at the defunct Pace Wildenstein gallery brought her back into the spotlight, and a traveling retrospective a decade later helped cement her place in the Pop Art pantheon. Today, her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Walker Art Center, and many others.

“My main tenets were to amuse myself, to be honest with what I think,” Drexler said in a 2017 oral history for the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, “and also to try new stuff, to be inventive.”