Rosalyn Drexler, visual artist, novelist, Obie-winning playwright, Emmy-winning screenwriter, former professional wrestler, and mother of two died at home in New York City on September 3. She was 98 years old.
Her death came at one of the many high points of her long, action-packed career. Through her final decade, she painted prolifically, prompting the major retrospective Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is? which took place at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (2016, Waltham, Massachusetts) and traveled to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in October 2016 and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in February 2017. The exhibition was one of a number of retrospectives and survey exhibitions focused on her work throughout her career.
Her life was a testament to the possibilities that result when preternatural talent intersects with constitutional inhibition. Drexler fearlessly and repeatedly turned her creative energies to new endeavors. In addition to her work as a visual artist, she was an accomplished novelist and playwright, authoring 9 novels, 10 plays, and the novelization of 4 screenplays, including that of Rocky. Drexler received three Obie Awards, as well as an Emmy Award for her work on Lily Tomlin’s television special Lily (co-written with Richard Pryor). Of her ceaseless, roving artistic production she has said, “It’s all-enveloping, intriguing, and the best way to live.”
Drexler began making and exhibiting visual art in the 1950s. By the early 1960s, she had become a fixture of the Pop Art scene. In her work, Drexler appropriated images from magazines, newspapers, and movie posters, weaving together the prosaic and the iconic. She painted over her collaged images with bright pigments, eliminating the visual trace of the underlying, mechanically reproduced source material. At a time when narrative—banished by the Abstract Expressionists—was relegated to the speech bubbles in Lichtenstein’s paintings, Drexler presented a farrago of tabloids, history, and social issues presented in the vernacular of American 1940s Film Noir and French Nouvelle Vague. Her paintings depicted infinite admixtures of violence, brutality, desire, pathos, power, desolation and playfulness, reflecting her Shakespearian taste for the variety and range of human qualities. Drexler’s imagery was complex and more difficult to immediately recall than that of her contemporaries: her paintings are iconic in incident as well as image.
“It was a rich life,” Drexler said in a recent interview with Artnet.
She is survived by her son Daniel Drexler.