Rosalyn Drexler wrote her first novel on a dare. Up till then she was known mostly as an avant-garde sculptor and painter in New York. But after the editor Richard Grossman, then launching his own publishing house, read a few paragraphs she drafted on a lark in the early 1960s, he was impressed enough that he offered the amateur writer a book contract. “You do know that I’ve never written a novel,” Drexler told him. “Well, you will,” he countered.
She made good on his bet. Based on her 1940s adolescence in the Bronx, I Am the Beautiful Stranger, brought out by Grossman Publishers in 1965, was deemed a “subtly liberating,” “wholly original,” and “enormously replenishing” novel by The New York Times Book Review. The Beat poet Gregory Corso wrote to Drexler after reading it, thanking her for writing such an “honest and compelling” book.
“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. In September, the gallery will stage a greatest-hits show at its new location in SoHo, along with a presentation at the Independent 20th Century art fair. The gallery exhibition will include Drexler’s writing and art but also 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 raised by parents of Russian Jewish descent. She was a precocious kid 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, Rachel. Her son, Daniel, was born 11 years later.
Drexler’s brief foray into 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 the 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 a young Rachel at home. She didn’t love life on the road, but it made for good material for her rollicking third novel, To Smithereens, published in 1972. (She was later the subject, as wrestler Rosa Carlo, of a Warhol silkscreen painting.)
Back in New York, she hung out at the Cedar Bar, the famed 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 pivoted to painting, hoping that might give her a better chance.
She became a Pop art pioneer, gluing enlarged ads she found in magazines and newspapers onto canvas before painting over them in vivid tones. “It was naive, but it worked,” Drexler reflected in a 2017 essay. She placed her subjects at odd, sometimes extreme, angles, and she was particularly 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 was born out of 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.”
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.”