Women in the Pop Art Movement: The Remarkable, Unstoppable Rosalyn Drexler

An exhibition titled “Seductive Subversion” opened in 2010 in Philadelphia featuring more than 50 works by female artists of the Pop art era from 1958 to 1968. Among the artists is one remarkable and apparently unstoppable woman named Rosalyn Drexler. Nov. 26, 2011, marks her 85th birthday.

Born Rosalyn Bronznick in the Bronx, Drexler has been her name since 1946, the year she turned 20 and married painter Sherman Drexler. But Pop art has not been her only career. She has also been a successful fiction writer, a playwright who has won Rockefeller Grants and Obie awards, a screenwriter who has won an Emmy, a sculptor, a singer and would you believe, a professional wrestler, albeit briefly, using the name Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire! Andy Warhol photographed her in the latter role so she ended up appearing in several of his silkscreens. She later used her wrestling experience to write a novel titled To Smithereens.

Drexler started out a voice major in New York City’s music and art high school. Although she did attend Hunter College, she only lasted one semester, dropping out once she married and moved with her husband to California. While he completed his art studies at Berkeley, the self-taught artist began to experiment with sculptures based on found materials. After they returned to New York, she switched to paintings. Like the famous names of the movement – Warhol, Lichtenstein and Wesselman for example – she worked with popular images, creating a collage from paper and magazine clippings and then painting over the canvas with strong, bold colors. Although she did eventually exhibit at the Kornblee Gallery, she never gained the celebrity of her male counterparts.

Some of her best-known works include Marilyn Pursued by Death, The Defenders and This is My Wedding, all dating from 1963, a series titled Study for Men Machines from 1965, Is it true what they say about Dixie from 1966 as well as the Love series painted in the Sixties. Experts consider her work thematic, ranging from sexuality to violence to isolation, but she did not view herself a socially conscious artist. A Guggenheim Fellow, Drexler is represented in collections of the Whitney Museum, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and Walker Art Center.

Her novels were published under her own name as well as a pseudonym Julia Sorel. The first, I Am the Beautiful Stranger, dates from 1965. Her twelfth novel, Vulgar Lives was published in 2007. She won her Emmy in 1974 for scripting a TV special for Lily Tomlin. She won Obies for the off-Broadway plays Home Movies, 1967, The Writer’s Opera, 1979 and Transients Welcome in 1984.

The “Seductive Subversion” exhibition of works by her and other women in the Pop art movement continues to tour in 2011. Philadelphia’s University of the Arts plans to honor Drexler or has honored her (date information is conflicting) with an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts Degree. Only fitting for such a super talent.

Sources:

Ken Johnson, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/15/arts/design/15women.html, New York Times, 2010

http://www.artknowledgenews.com/Rosalyn_Drexler.html

http://brooklynrail.org/2007/04/artseen/drexler

http://www.fallonandrosof.com/2004/03/rosalyn-drexler-you-couldnt-have-known.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalyn_Drexler

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Rosalyn-Drexler/126979454012145

http://www.artnet.com/Galleries/Exhibitions.asp?gid=826&cid=116276


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