Polymathic artist Rosalyn Drexler — Pop Artwork icon, Emmy-winning screenwriter, and one-time wrestler — handed away at her dwelling in New York yesterday, September 3, at age 98. Her demise was confirmed by Garth Greenan Gallery, which represented her for a decade.
Within the Sixties, Drexler developed what would turn into her signature portray course of. She sourced photos from posters, magazines, and different pop cultural print media, which she then organized and enlarged on sheets of paper, earlier than gluing them to canvas and portray over them in brilliant colours. Her work from then via the ’80s probe gender and energy as carried out in popular culture.
Maybe associated to her profitable profession in writing — she notably penned the novelistic adaptation of the movie Rocky (1976) beneath a pseudonym — narrative and character had been a specific focus. She captured her protagonists, usually males in fits or swooning ladies, mid-action — a slap, a kiss — towards abstracted coloration fields. The ensuing work are compositionally masterful, with the clear traces of a film poster charged with the psychologically unsettling undertones of a Rorschach check.
Rosalyn Drexler, “Love and Violence” (1963), acrylic, oil, and paper collage on canvas
Her 1963 work “Love and Violence,” for example, resembles a movie reel spliced right into a Mondrian portray: Orthogonal traces divide blocks of main colours, inside which play out scenes like a girl recoiling from a person’s possessive hand clamped beneath her chin. As critic John Yau wrote in a 2017 evaluation 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 within the Bronx, New York, to Jewish immigrants from Russia. Attending the vivid spectacle of vaudeville exhibits and enjoying with artwork posters, books, and coloring units had been amongst her early inventive influences. She majored in voice on the Excessive College of Music and Artwork in Manhattan, now the LaGuardia Excessive College of Music and the Arts, and went on to attend Hunter School for a single semester earlier than marrying her husband, figurative expressionist painter Sherman Drexler, in 1946. He died in 2014, forsaking a physique of work of which she is usually the topic.
Within the late ’40s, the couple lived in Berkeley, California, the place Drexler started making assemblage sculptures out of discovered scrap metallic and wooden. By 1951, the couple had moved to Hell’s Kitchen on Manhattan’s west aspect, close to a fitness center the place skilled ladies wrestlers practiced. She turned a wrestler herself beneath an alter ego, whom Andy Warhol captured in a collection of silkscreen work, Album of the Mat Queen (c. 1962–63). She would go on to write down a critically acclaimed guide in 1972 based mostly on her time each within the ring and within the artwork world, To Smithereens, which was republished by Hagfish earlier this 12 months.
Rosalyn Drexler as her wrestling alter ego (c. 1950) (picture by Sherman Drexler)
Drexler constructed a wealthy 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 amongst her shut mates; and took part within the Happenings. She was represented by Reuben Gallery, which closed after a 12 months in 1961, and Korn Blee Gallery from 1964 to ’66, and confirmed in group exhibitions at areas like Tempo, along with penning 9 novels and 10 performs.
Nonetheless, she didn’t obtain the identical recognition as her male friends, whether or not due to her gender, the subject material she was drawn to, or each. Certainly, a political consciousness underpinned Drexler’s life and artwork: In a 1971 dialog with Elaine de Kooning printed in response to Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” she stated, “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.”
Towards the top of her life, Drexler lastly started to obtain her due. A 2007 survey on the defunct Tempo Wildenstein gallery introduced her again into the highlight, and a touring retrospective a decade later helped cement her place within the Pop Artwork pantheon. Immediately, her work is held within the collections of the Museum of Fashionable Artwork, the Whitney Museum of American Artwork, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Backyard, the Walker Artwork Heart, and lots of others.
“My main tenets were to amuse myself, to be honest with what I think,” Drexler stated in a 2017 oral historical past for the Archives of American Artwork on the Smithsonian Establishment, “and also to try new stuff, to be inventive.”
Rosalyn, Rachel, and Sherman Drexler of their East Broadway Residence (c. 1963) (picture by William Klein)
