Photo Fred W. McDarrah/Getty Images
Rosalyn Drexler, whose paintings of the 1960s about Hollywood actors, on-screen violence, and gender subversion have in recent years gained widespread praise, died in New York on Wednesday at 98. A spokesperson for New York’s Garth Greenan Gallery, which represents her, confirmed her death but did not state a cause.
Drexler is today thought to be one of the key artists associated with the Pop art movement of the 1960s, though she was for many years considered an obscure figure. Alongside the colorful paintings she produced, she also wrote novels, one of which—her 1972 book To Smithereens—was republished this year to critical acclaim. Prior to becoming an artist, she also briefly had a career as a professional wrestler.
Her ’60s paintings share affinities with some of the most famous works of the Pop era. Like Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist, she painted Marilyn Monroe and other actors who appeared regularly in the movies. Like Roy Lichtenstein, she displayed a zest for commercial imagery and the bright hues of advertising. Like Marisol, she seemed to express a concern for how the media encouraged violence upon women.
Drexler frequently worked with ready-made pictures, applying her paint directly onto her images, whose subject matter was immediately recognizable. But in painting away the context that once accompanied these pictures and surrounding them in fields of blazing color, she defamiliarized these pictures.
Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery/Whitney Museum, New York
In his review of Drexler’s 2016 survey at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, critic Raphael Rubenstein wrote in Art in America, “She turns up the retinal volume again and again in the grounds of her paintings—vast seas of cerulean blue edged by crisp white lines, or enveloping acts of domestic violence; equally riveting cadmium reds, oranges, and crimsons saturating the picture plane beneath angry gorillas, dancing Chubby Checkers, and kissing lovers; Day-Glo yellows that push up against sharp blacks as ‘bad guys’ in black suits point guns and walk up and down staircases—and employs unusual compositional strategies to draw our attention to these expanses of high-key color.”
Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery/Buffalo AKG Art Museum
During the era in which they were made, these paintings were not treated as great works. “I don’t think my paintings were seen much back in the 1960s,” Drexler told Artforum in 2016. “It was the time for Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism; Pop was just beginning to rear its huge, glittering head. My work was a secret kind of thing.”
No longer are her paintings so secret. Following the Rose Art Museum show, her works were collected widely among US institutions, with the Museum of Modern Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and the Whitney Museum among those to acquire their first Drexler paintings within the past decade.
Rosalyn Drexler was born Rosalyn Bronznick in 1937 in New York. Her parents, both of whom were Jewish, were immigrants from Russia who brought her to performing arts events. But she expressed little desire to become an artist when she was a child. “I always wanted to be a writer, even when I was a kid,” she told the Brooklyn Rail.
Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery/Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Still, she was drawn to the coloring books her mother purchased for her and to the creations of a friend who drew outlines around objects in pictures she found. Reproductions also played an important role in Drexler’s artistic education.
“We were poor,” Drexler told the artist Elaine de Kooning in a 1971 ARTnews interview. “It was around the time of the Depression. We owned no art, no books. But a newspaper offered for a few cents, and a coupon, reproductions of famous paintings. My mother sent for a Turner seascape, a Rembrandt self-portrait and a Vermeer. This was the first great art I had ever seen.”
Drexler attended Hunter College, but she remained there for just one year. She then married Sherman Drexler and moved to Berkeley, California. There, the couple showed their art alongside each other, with Rosalyn exhibiting assemblages made from what she described as “junk from the street” in an Artnet News profile.
Photo Sherman Drexler
They moved back to New York in 1951, and Drexler briefly took up wrestling under the moniker Rosa Carlo the Mexican Spitfire, a name she chose after flipping through the phone book. “I trained in a hotel room by hitting a pillow,” she told the Rail. “In the ring suddenly, I could have broken my back, I was tossed across the ring. Fell correctly though, which was good. I learned how to fall. I was the baby face, because the baby face takes all the punishment until the great retaliation.” (Much later on, Warhol would make silkscreen prints in which Drexler poses as her wrestling persona.)
Having toured the US as a wrestler for three months, Drexler returned to making her sculptures, though she gained little recognition for them. Positive remarks from the sculptor David Smith moved her to continue on. “He said, ‘Don’t give up sculpture; I’ve known women sculptors and they stop; don’t stop,’” Drexler recalled in the 1971 ARTnews interview. “I feel sort of guilty now because I turned to painting and writing.”
Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
She ended up having an illustrious writing career, penning 10 plays and nine novels. Those plays and novels contained the same quirkiness as her paintings: one book centered around a talking dog; another, around a fictionalized version of Rocky, the titular hero of the sports movie franchise. Her writing tended to have a biographical element. To Smithereens, her recently republished 1972 novel, was about the New York art scene, and even involved a woman named Rosa who is moved to become a professional wrestler.
But unlike many beloved painters of the 1960s, Drexler’s artistic opportunities remained limited. She never operated a studio, and she took jobs outside the art world. Her Artnet profile listed off stints as a masseuse and a house cleaner, a waitress and a professor.
As the history of Pop has been reappraised, so too has Drexler’s oeuvre. She appeared in the 2015 Tate Modern exhibition “The World Goes Pop,” which dramatically expanded the movement’s canon. Earlier this summer, the New York Times named the republished version of To Smithereens one of the best books of 2025 so far.
In interviews, Drexler seemed surprised by the praise she received during the later part of her career. “I know it’s all success, but when it comes this late in life, you miss the people you could share it with,” Drexler told Artnet. “It’s hard to believe how quietly time really passes.”