Rosalyn Drexler

Rosalyn Drexler
Born Rosalyn Broznick
(1926-11-25)November 25, 1926
Bronx, NY, United States
Nationality American
Known for Painting
Notable work Marilyn Pursued by Death, 1963
Movement Pop Art
Spouse(s) Sherman Drexler

Rosalyn Drexler (born 1926) is an artist, novelist, Obie Award-winning playwright, and Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, and former professional wrestler. She grew up in the Bronx and East Harlem, New York. Her first foray into visual art making was in sculpture in the late 1950s; she would often use found objects and make small-scale assemblages. Later, she would switch to painting, the medium for which she is most well-known. As in sculpture, she used found imagery in her painting, though this time the imagery was sourced from pop culture rather than the New York City streets. Photographs from newspapers, television stills, and movie posters were frequent sources of inspiration. Her oeuvre has been linked to Pop art, though she is considerably less well-known than her contemporaries Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselmann. This may be due to the fact that in the 1980s she shifted her focus to writing and other trades and was initially part of an art world where female artists encountered a considerable amount of bias. However, recently, her work has received renewed critical attention and a retrospective exhibition of her complete oeuvre opened at the Rose Art Museum in February 2016. She lives and works in Newark, NJ.

She is represented exclusively by Garth Greenan Gallery.[1]

Early life

Rosalyn Drexler (née Bronznick) was born in 1926 in the Bronx, New York. Drexler has said of her New York upbringing,

I grew up in East Harlem and the Bronx. My grandparents had a secondhand store in Harlem, I used to climb up to the loft where they kept the mattresses, and I hid there: warm, giggling, sure they’d never find me, and we lived there for a while. Grandpa used to buy stolen jewelry that he kept in boxes under the bed. There were diamond tie-pins, and gold watches. I heard the adults whispering about it. There’s a whole thing I went through about growing up in the Bronx where they still had tomato plants growing. It was like a whole different place. And the Russian immigrants sat in Van Cortlandt Park across from Hunter Hall playing mahjong. I can still hear that sound. The clicking of the ivory pieces.[2]

She attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City where she majored in voice. She attended Hunter College for one semester only before leaving school to marry figure painter Sherman Drexler in 1946.[3] She is the subject of many of her husband's paintings.[4] They have a daughter and a son.

In 1955, Drexler exhibited her first works along with those of her husband Sherman in Berkeley, California. These lumpen plaster accretions, built around found scrap metal and wood armatures, were very much in keeping with the informal aspects of Abstract-Expressionist-influenced Beat sculpture of the time.

After she had returned East, her works were shown in New York in 1960 at Reuban Gallery, whose associates included Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine. Notables of the New York School including David Smith and Franz Kline endorsed her sculptures.

Soon after the Reuban's Gallery closure, Drexler began painting, organically developing her work from assemblage to Pop Art.[5]

Professional Wrestling Career

In 1951 Drexler pursued a brief career as a professional wrestler under the name "Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire."[6] Andy Warhol made a series of silkscreen paintings based on a photograph of Drexler from her wrestling days.[7] Drexler's experience as Rosa Carlo later formed the basis of her 1972 critically acclaimed novel To Smithereens. The novel inspired the 1980 film Below the Belt.

Artistic career

Drexler began making found-object sculptures while living in Berkeley, California where her husband was finishing his art degree. Made as amusements for display in her home, Drexler exhibited her work once she moved back to New York City at the urging of dealer Ivan Karp. One critic called these early works "ridiculous and nutty" sculptures that revealed a "real beauty beneath their I-don't-care attitudes."[8]

Drexler had her first solo exhibition in 1960 at New York's Reuben Gallery, a downtown cooperative that showed other emerging Pop artists such as George Segal and Claes Oldenburg, as well as Allan Kaprow and other Fluxus artists. The first Happenings also took place at the Reuben Gallery, in which Drexler participated.[9] However, the Reuben Gallery closed after a year. While other artists had little difficulty finding representation elsewhere, Drexler struggled.

Women were not bankable at that time. Every other male artist…other galleries came along. I received no offers. In my naivete I thought it was because I was not a painter so I must make paintings. —Rosalyn Drexler[10]

Despite encouragement from sculptor David Smith to continue working in the same medium, Drexler switched her focus to painting in the early 1960s.[11] Entirely self-taught, her process consisted of blowing up images from magazines and newspapers, collaging them onto canvas, and then painting over them in bright, saturated colors. Drexler started appropriating popular imagery in her art at the same time as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein were developing similar techniques, putting her at the forefront of the Pop art movement.

Drexler eventually signed with Kornblee Gallery, where she had solo shows in 1964–1966. In January 1964 her work was included in the "First International Girlie Exhibit" at Pace Gallery, New York. She and Marjorie Strider were the only two women Pop artists included in this landmark exhibition, which otherwise featured a variety of male artists including Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselmann.

Drexler exhibited collages cut and pasted from girlie magazines. The work scandalized many, but her paintings were otherwise well received. As one critic noted, "Miss Drexler’s collage paintings…fly through contemporary life and fantasy with a virtuosic, uninhibited imagination that is refreshingly direct in its frank expression of brutality, desire, pathos and playfulness."[12]

Although her paintings continued to enjoy favorable reviews and were exhibited in major Pop art exhibitions throughout the 1960s, Drexler did not gain the same level of recognition or success as many of her male peers. Not only was she a woman in a male-dominated field, the major themes in her paintings—violence against women, racism, social alienation—were decidedly "hot" topics in a genre known for being "cool" and detached.[13] For these reasons, her Pop paintings have been identified more recently as early feminist artworks, yet Drexler vehemently objected to the label.

Don't try to make me into a politically conscious artist. I wasn't. I don't teach lessons...My work does not lend itself to causes. Unless it does when I'm not looking. —Rosalyn Drexler[14]

In 1968, Drexler signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[15]

Major Themes & Works

Drexler's work often revolves around women's roles as portrayed in pulp cinema, as well as her own experiences, including women as moll, femme fatale, home wrecker - those "destined to receive a physical slap as brutal moral comeuppance." [16] This type of full-on violence mirrored the reality for American women in general, communicated in images drawn from public media that are easily understood by all.

Specifically, *The Love and Violence series refers to a body of paintings that depicts abusive relationships between men and women. The canvases evoke the covers of pulp fiction novels, B-movie posters, and scenes from gangster films or film noir.[17] Titles such as I Won’t Hurt You (1964), This is My Wedding (1963), and Rape (1962) make explicit the sexual violence against women suggested in the scene. While the men depicted are most often the abusers, in some paintings, such as Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) and Dangerous Liaison (1963), the power dynamic between the male and female subjects is left more indeterminate. Other works in this series include The Bite (1963), Love and Violence (1965), and Baby, It’s Alright (1963).

The painting's title is taken from an American song popularized in the mid-1950s by Dean Martin and Bill Haley that suggests the South is a romantic idyll. Drexler's painting acts as an ironic commentary on the racial violence of her time.[18]

Similar in composition and intent is the painting F.B.I. (1964) that both glamorizes the depicted government agents and inherently questions their status as figures of authority.

Selected Exhibitions

Solo Exhibitions

1960

1963

1964

1965

1966

1967

1973

1976

1978

1986

1992

1998

2000

2004

2006

2007

2015

2016

Group Exhibitions

1960

1961

1962

1963

1964

1965

1966

1967

1970

1972

1974

1975

1977

1978

1979

1984

1987

1991

1992

2001

2007

2010

2012

2014

2015

2016–2017

Selected Public Collections

Books

Novels

Adapted Screenplays

written under the pseudonym Julia Sorel

Plays

Published work

Productions

Film and Television

TV

Film

Awards

Further reading

External links

References

  1. ↑ http://www.garthgreenan.com/artists/rosalyn-drexler
  2. ↑ John Yau, "In Conversation: Rosalyn Drexler with John Yau" the Brooklyn Rail, July–August 2007.http://brooklynrail.org/2007/07/art/rosalyn-drexler-with-john-yau
  3. ↑ Roberta Fallon, "You couldn't have known my work. How could you?" the artblog, March 27, 2004.http://theartblog.org/2004/03/rosalyn-drexler-you-couldnt-have-known-my-work-how-could-you/
  4. ↑ "Her husband, a figure painter, considers her his only model—and 'that's the way it had damed well better be,' said Mrs. Drexler." Excerpt from Grace Glueck, "Hip Heidi," The New York Times, April 25, 1965. See also "Sherman Drexler. Art Paradise: Fifty Years of Painting. January 13-February 12, 2005" Press release, Mitchell Algus Gallery, 2005. http://mitchellalgus.com/pr/sdrexlerpr05.html
  5. ↑ Axell, Evelyne, and Angela Stief. "Rosalyn Drexler." Power up - Female Pop Art: Evelyne Axell, Sister Corita, Christa Dichgans, Rosalyn Drexler, Jann Haworth, Dorothy Iannone, Kiki Kogelnik, Marisol, Niki De Saint Phalle ; Kunsthalle Wien, 5. November 2010 Bis 20. Februar 2011, Phoenix Art. Köln: Dumont, 2010. 129.
  6. ↑ Roni Feinstein, "Strangers No More," Art in America, June/July 2007, p. 177. See also Roberta Fallon, "You couldn't have known my work. How could you?" the artblog, March 27, 2004.http://theartblog.org/2004/03/rosalyn-drexler-you-couldnt-have-known-my-work-how-could-you
  7. ↑ Bradford R. Collins, "Reclamations: Rosalyn Drexler's Early Pop Paintings, 1961-1967," in Sachs and Minioudaki, Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, New York and London: Abbeville Press, 2010, p. 164.The photograph was not taken by Warhol as indicated by Collins.
  8. ↑ V.P. "Nine [Tanager], " ARTNews, Summer 1961, p. 18.
  9. ↑ L.C. "Three More Faces of Eve: Rosalyn Drexler," ARTNews, March 1964, p. 64. See also Bradford R. Collins, "Reclamations: Rosalyn Drexler's Early Pop Paintings, 1961-67" in Sachs and Minioudaki (2010), p. 164.
  10. ↑ Rosalyn Drexler, as quoted in Roberta Fallon, "You couldn't have known my work. How could you?" the artblog, March 27, 2004.http://theartblog.org/2004/03/rosalyn-drexler-you-couldnt-have-known-my-work-how-could-you/
  11. ↑ Elaine de Kooning with Rosalyn Drexler, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Eight Artists Reply. Dialogue," ARTnews, January 1971.
  12. ↑ J.J., "Rosayln Drexler and Tom Doyle [Zabriskie; April 15-May 4]" ARTNews, April 1963, p. 14."
  13. ↑ Bradford R. Collins, "Reclamations: Rosalyn Drexler's Early Pop Paintings, 1961-67" in Sachs and Minioudaki (2010), p. 162.
  14. ↑ Rosalyn Drexler, as quoted in Bradford R. Collins (2010), p. 166.
  15. ↑ "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" January 30, 1968 New York Post
  16. ↑ Sid Sachs, reviewing Rosalyn Drexler in POWER UP: Female Pop Art. Kunsthalle Wien, Gargosian Gallery (Dumont Publishers) - p129.
  17. ↑ Collins (2010), p. 166.
  18. ↑ Jorge Daniel Veneciano, "Rosalyn Drexler and the Ends of Man," in Rosalyn Drexler and the Ends of Man, exhibition catalogue, Paul Robeson Gallery, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2006, pp. 16-18.
  19. ↑ http://archive.org/stream/commencementprog2007univ/commencementprog2007univ_djvu.txt
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