“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 who will stage a greatest-hits show in September. The 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 print.)
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.