Rosalyn Drexler wrote her first novel on a dare. Until then, she was known mainly as an avant-garde sculptor and painter in New York. But in the early 1960s, after editor Richard Grossman—who was launching his own publishing house—read a few paragraphs she had written just for fun, he was impressed enough to offer the amateur writer a book contract. “You do know that I’ve never written a novel,” Drexler told him. “Well, you will,” he replied.

She made good on his bet. Based on her teenage years in the Bronx during the 1940s, I Am the Beautiful Stranger was published by Grossman Publishers in 1965. The New York Times Book Review called it “subtly liberating,” “wholly original,” and “enormously replenishing.” Beat poet Gregory Corso wrote to Drexler after reading it, thanking her for writing such an “honest and compelling” book.

Drexler, who passed away last year at age 98, had a life full of such unlikely successes. She was the kind of creative polymath who excelled at nearly everything she tried. A self-taught painter, she brought a sharp feminist perspective to the emerging Pop art movement. She won an Obie Award for her first theater piece, Home Movies (1964), which Susan Sontag called “fast and witty.” She was also part of the Emmy-winning writing team—alongside Lorne Michaels and Richard Pryor—for Lily Tomlin’s 1973 television special. She received a Guggenheim fellowship for fiction and a MacDowell fellowship for painting. She even spent time as a professional wrestler—its own kind of performance art.

Drexler as Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire, circa 1950.
Photograph by Sherman Drexler.

“At that time, in the ’60s and ’70s, you were supposed to pick a lane,” says Garth Greenan, whose New York City gallery has represented Drexler since 2015 and will stage a greatest-hits show in September. The exhibition will include Drexler’s writing and art, as well as personal correspondence and home movies she made with her husband, the late painter Sherman Drexler. “I want to put every ounce of steam that I can behind Rosalyn,” Greenan says.

Rosalyn Bronznick was born in the Bronx in 1926, the oldest of three daughters of Russian Jewish parents. She was a precocious child and attended the High School of Music & Art (now LaGuardia). She met Sherman in Van Cortlandt Park—at the time she was studying with a dance group—and married him at 19, dropping out of Hunter College after one semester. At 20, she had her first child, a daughter named Rachel. Her son, Daniel, was born 11 years later.

Drexler’s brief stint in professional wrestling was partly to escape the constraints of domestic life. “I’ve got to get away from this family thing for a while,” she told critic John Yau in 2007. She joined an all-women troupe and chose the wrestling nickname Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire (a stretch for a Jewish girl from the Bronx). For a few months, she toured with the group across the South, leaving Sherman and young Rachel at home. She didn’t love life on the road, but it made great material for her lively third novel, To Smithereens, published in 1972. (She was later the subject, as wrestler Rosa Carlo, of a Warhol silkscreen print.)

Back in New York, she hung out at the Cedar Bar, the famous Greenwich Village dive, with friends like Willem and Elaine de Kooning, and began showing found-object sculptures. Her solo show in 1960 at the experimental Reuben Gallery in the East Village marked her official entry onto the city’s art scene. But when the gallery closed in 1961, she couldn’t find a new one to represent her, so she turned to painting, hoping that might give her a better chance.

Lost Match, 1962, acrylic and paper collage on canvas board.
Collection of Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University.

She became a Pop art pioneer, gluing enlarged ads she found in magazines and newspapers onto canvas before painting over them in vivid tones.Yes. “It was naive, but it worked,” Drexler reflected in a 2017 essay. She placed her subjects at odd, sometimes extreme, angles, and was especially drawn to images that captured the gendered power dynamics in romantic relationships. Her two requirements for anything she made were that it had to be honest and it had to amuse her. Beyond that, she wasn’t all that interested in what others thought.

“I think Drexler is almost alone among artists of her generation in pointing to physical violence against women as a casual part of the media landscape,” says Katy Siegel, the co-curator of a retrospective that opened at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in 2016. Drexler never publicly disclosed whether her interest in the topic came from her own experience. Her point was that aggression was all around us, deeply embedded in American culture.

By the mid-1960s, she turned her focus to writing. In addition to her award-winning plays and novels, she wrote occasional film reviews, including for this magazine. “She was so out of the box in her perceptions,” says the poet and musician Joy Harjo, who became close friends with Drexler at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1976, when Drexler was on the faculty and Harjo was pursuing her MFA. Both women felt like outsiders at the prestigious institution, and Harjo was drawn to Drexler’s irreverence. “She was my place of sanity when I was trying to find my way.”

LADY IN RED
Drexler’s Chain Smoker (1960) on the cover of the new edition of her 1974 novel.

The limelight started to fade in the 1980s. Drexler’s art wasn’t shown as much. But in the last decade or so before her death, new champions (including the writer Jonathan Lethem) pulled her back into the zeitgeist. Rachel Comey, who dove into Drexler’s archive for inspiration for her spring 2027 collection, has newly joined the list of admirers, as has Hagfish, an indie publishing house run by 30-somethings Naomi Huffman and Julia Ringo that reissues out-of-print books. “We were looking for something loud and fresh, something unusual, something to really help us establish the voice of the project,” says Huffman. They published To Smithereens as their first title last spring, and this fall they’ll reissue Drexler’s 1974 madcap satire The Cosmopolitan Girl, about a woman in a relationship with her talking dog.

If there was a downside to all of Drexler’s multihyphenating, it’s that she was never fully at home in one discipline. “She kind of did it all, but she did say to me that she was always there, but she was never there,” says Adam Harrison Levy, a writer and filmmaker at work on a documentary about Drexler. Maybe that’s her true transgression: She refused to commit to just one thing. “She wanted to write her own story,” Greenan says, “which speaks to all the different roles that she played in the theater that was her life.”

Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs about Rosalyn Drexler covering her many talents and life

Beginner Questions

1 Who was Rosalyn Drexler
Rosalyn Drexler was an American artist novelist and playwright She was a true multitalent but she is most famous for being a pioneer of the Pop Art movement in the 1960s

2 What is she best known for
She is best known for her Pop Art paintings and collages which often featured images from popular culture such as movie stars wrestlers and magazine clippings She was also known for her unexpected career as a professional wrestler

3 Was she really a wrestler
Yes In the 1950s she wrestled professionally under the stage name Rosa Carlo the Mexican Spitfire She did this to earn money to support her family while she was trying to become an artist

4 How did her wrestling career influence her art
Her time in the wrestling ring heavily influenced her art She used images of wrestlers and other figures from mass media in her paintings exploring themes of violence performance and the human body

5 Did she write books
Yes she was a prolific author She wrote several novels plays and essays Her writing like her art was often satirical and explored themes of pop culture gender and class

Advanced Questions

6 Why is she considered a pioneer of Pop Art if she isnt as famous as Andy Warhol
She was creating Pop Art at the same time as Warhol Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg However she was often overlooked because she was a woman in a maledominated art world Her work was more political and feminist which didnt fit the typical cool and detached style of her male peers making her a unique but sometimes marginalized figure in the movement

7 What are the main themes in her visual art
Her paintings often tackled dark and complex themes including violence sexuality and the objectification of women She used a satirical and cartoonish style to critique the very images of glamour and masculinity that she borrowed from movies and magazines

8 What awards did she win for her writing
Her 1972 novel