The renowned Pop Art painter and polymath Rosalyn Drexler—once a member of an all-women travelling wrestling troupe—has died aged 98, according to a statement from New York-based Garth Greenan Gallery which represents her.
Drexler first began exhibiting her work during the late 1950s and was a fixture of the Pop Art scene by the early 1960s, the gallery says. Her works at the time incorporate images from magazines, newspapers, and movie posters. Her 1963 collage The Dream features King Kong, while Study for No Pictures (1963) draws on an image by the crime scene photographer Weegee.
“Although Drexler is mentioned in the early histories of Pop, she received little serious attention at the time,” wrote the critic Bradford Collins in a Garth Greenan catalogue. He adds: “As [the critic] Robert Storr so nicely put it in a recent reappraisal of her work for a Rosenwald Wolf Gallery catalogue: ‘It is the fate of some artists to arrive at the station on time, and still find themselves being left on the platform as the train pulls away without them’.”
Drexler was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1926 and attended LaGuardia High School of Music and the Arts and later Hunter College, dropping out at 19 to marry the artist Sherman Drexler.
“I grew up in the Bronx, not far from Van Cortlandt Park, which is so big it felt like its own country then,” she wrote in Frieze (2017). “I didn’t go into Manhattan often until I attended the High School of Music and Arts, years later, though I remember visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art with my father and seeing a Jean-Simon Chardin painting of a peach, which impressed me because it looked so juicy, so perfect.”
After a period in California, the married couple moved back to New York in the 1950s, settling in the district around 42nd Street. At a local gym, Rosalyn was introduced to the all-women wrestling group, which she joined under the pseudonym Mexican Spitfire.
“These lady wrestlers were always travelling by bus and always getting into accidents, which is how slots opened up. They soon called me, and I went to a hotel in Florida to meet the other women. These were tough dames. One of them was leaning into a mirror and taking bone fragments out of her gums with a tweezer,” Drexler wrote.
She describes life in 1970s New York, detailing friendships and relationships. “Most of my friends were abstract expressionists, though—Elaine de Kooning and Franz Kline—and it’s obvious that none of their paintings influenced me whatsoever. Kline and I did an exchange once: a small painting of mine for one of his studies on a phone-book page.
“Elaine and I were very close. In 1971, we published Why Are There No Great Women Painters in ARTnews, our response to Linda Nochlin’s article Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Elaine was very bright, but she refused to acknowledge that women artists had a problem being recognised.”
In the 1980s, she began, as she wrote, painting men and machines. “I was very much interested in the relationship of men to their machines or the things they work with: I felt a certain silent intensity in that interaction. I wasn’t thinking about patriarchy, though politics did creep into the work.
“Sometimes, masks can be very sinister, like in The Machine (Who Art these Masked Men), 1988, my painting of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev standing masked in front of a large machine, or my painting of a masked Joseph Goebbels (Nazi in the Garden, 1988).”
In 2017, she opened a show entitled Occupational Hazard at Garth Greenan Gallery. “Nothing you see in her work should fit together, but it does,” wrote John Yau in Hyperallergic. “That’s what Drexler does that no other artist associated with Pop Art was able to do.
“She brought a lively imagination to bear on the banal and absurd images that dominate our lives,” he added. “And especially the banal imagery emanating from the art world, and made them into something to contemplate.” Drexler also wrote novels (The Cosmoplitan Girl, 1975) and plays as well as an Emmy-winning comedy show (Lily, 1974).
