Rosalyn Drexler, an Obie Award-winning playwright, Emmy Award-winning comedy writer, acclaimed novelist, lauded Pop Art painter, found-objects sculptor, self-described funky nightclub singer, frequent book and film critic, onetime professional wrestler and lifelong feminist, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 98.
The death was confirmed by Lloyd Wise, a director of the Garth Greenan Gallery in Manhattan, which represented Ms. Drexler’s work.
“There is a feeling among Rosalyn Drexler’s friends,” Nora Ephron wrote in The New York Post in 1965, “that she is carrying this Renaissance Woman bit a little too far.” And she was just getting started.
An article in Newsweek about her 1963 exhibition at Kornblee Gallery in Manhattan praised her collage paintings for their reflection of “the tabloidization of the modern sensibility.” The article quoted Ms. Drexler about her painting “Time Trap,” which showed a man with a gun in the center of a clock. “Everybody is trapped in time,” she said. “It has no dimensions, and you can’t shoot your way out of it.”
In 1964, “Home Movies,” her evening of two one-act musicals, won an Obie for distinguished play, although Louis Calta, reviewing it for The New York Times, had found it “contrived and dotty.” She won the Obie again twice: in 1979, for “The Writer’s Opera,” about a woman’s dual role as artist and mother, and in 1985, for “Transients Welcome,” three one-acts. When Clive Barnes was chief theater critic of The Times, he pronounced Ms. Drexler “the queen of the underground drama.”
In 1965, she published her first novel, “I Am the Beautiful Stranger,” written in the form of the diary of a teenage girl in the Bronx. The author Terry Southern compared her to J.D. Salinger. Richard Gilman, writing in The Times Book Review, called it “enormously replenishing.”
Among her later novels were “The Cosmopolitan Girl” (1975), a farce about a single woman in a mutually affectionate, consensual love affair with a talking dog, and “To Smithereens” (1972), about a woman who becomes a wrestler, which received mixed reviews but inspired a 1980 movie, “Below the Belt.” One critic called “One or Another,” her 1970 novel in which a married woman has an affair with a high school adolescent, “Kafka as interpreted by the Marx Brothers.” Another critic once referred to her as perhaps the first Marx Sister. She wasn’t, but Chico Marx happened to be a cousin of Ms. Drexler’s by marriage.
In 1974, she shared a writing Emmy for “Lily,” a Lily Tomlin comedy special, whose writers also included Richard Pryor and Lorne Michaels. The show itself won the Emmy for outstanding comedy-variety, variety or music special.
When she wasn’t writing film or book reviews for The Times (she found Fay Weldon’s novel “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil” scintillating and considered theBarbra Streisand movie “Up the Sandbox” “a rip‐off giving lip service to authentic concerns but copping out in the end”) and other publications, she was writing letters to the editors. (Let others deride the film “Billy Jack”; she was a fan.) Her relatively low-key and short-lived nightclub singing career, which began in 1973, included performances at the popular Manhattan cabaret Reno Sweeney.
Sometimes she wrote film novelizations under the name Julia Sorel, most notably “Rocky” (1976), based on Sylvester Stallone’s Oscar-winning film about a boxer. The assignment made sense; she had experience in the ring.
It was always difficult to pinpoint Ms. Drexler’s professional identity. When an early play was produced, the program biography described her as “a well-known artist.” When she made her singing debut, a review identified her in part as “novelist, writer and painter.” Art in America magazine once characterized her career choices as displaying “an unusual fluidity in terms of creative identity.”
Ms. Drexler had a simple explanation. “It’s the same mind,” she said in a 2017 Archives of American Art oral history interview. “The same humor and the intensity, once I get into a project. Just the actual enjoyment of doing the thing.”
Rosalyn Bronznick was born on Nov. 25, 1926, in the Bronx, the oldest of three daughters of George and Hilda (Sherman) Bronznick, who were both the children of Jewish immigrants from Russia. George’s occupation was listed in the 1940 census as “ironmonger/novelty,” although Rosalyn later said he was a pharmacist.
Her parents often spoke Russian or Yiddish at home, she recalled, “to keep secrets from the children.” She traced the beginnings of her writing career to putting her parents’ arguments (the ones in English, presumably) on paper and presenting them with the evidence, which they would promptly tear up. Speaking to a Times reporter in 1972, she excused them. “Total encouragement is very unhealthy,” she said. “I’m glad I had a sort of unhappy childhood.”
Rosalyn grew up in the Bronx and Manhattan and studied voice at the High School of Music & Art (now the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts). She attended Hunter College for one semester, then dropped out at 19 to marry Sherman Drexler, a young figurative artist.
In the early 1950s, the Drexlers lived in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, near a gym whose members included female wrestlers. At her new friends’ suggestion, she joined them on tour for three months, fighting as Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire. Years later, Andy Warhol painted her as Rosa.
The couple lived briefly in Berkeley, Calif., where Mr. Drexler completed his bachelor’s degree and where they held a joint exhibition. Although she didn’t consider herself an artist, she collected a variety of found materials and turned them into sculptures.
Back in New York, she and her husband socialized with his fellow painters. “It was a rich life,” she said cheerfully in a 2017 Artnet News interview, discussing the days when Franz Kline and Elaine and Willem de Kooning were among their best friends and long hours were spent at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village. “I surrounded myself with artists, and it must have rubbed off.”
She began exhibiting as a sculptor in the late 1950s, selling a cross of wood and rusted metal to St. Paul’s Chapel in Lower Manhattan at an early show. When her gallery closed and all the male artists received other offers but she didn’t, she decided (naïvely, she said later) that it was because of her medium, not her gender, and she took up painting.
Starting with found imagery, she had the photos blown up, pasted them onto canvas, and then layered on swatches of intensely colored paint. Cerulean blues, cadmium reds and Day-Glo yellows were among her favorites. One of her frequent subjects was physical violence.
“Rub Out” (1982) shows a dead man in a gray overcoat, slumped over a table with blood spots on the yellow tablecloth. “Put It This Way” (1963) depicts a couple, against an electric blue background, just after the man has slapped the woman.
Mr. Drexler, who went on to win a Guggenheim fellowship, died in 2014. The couple’s daughter, Rachel Drexler, died in 2010. Her survivors include a son, Daniel.
Ms. Drexler’s work seemed to be informed by a very specific worldview. In “Who Does She Think She Is?,” a 1975 documentary about her life, one admirer — Jack Kroll, who at the time was Newsweek’s critic at large — suggested a theory: “Her essential insight is that people and things are completely insane, and she speaks from inside the whale.”
One of her last exhibitions was “Occupational Hazard,” at the Greenan Gallery in 2017. The art critic and poet John Yau reviewed the show — and her gift — for the arts website Hyperallergic.
“Nothing you see in her work should fit together, but it does,” he wrote. “That’s what Drexler does that no other artist associated with Pop Art was able to do.
“She brought a lively imagination to bear on the banal and absurd images that dominate our lives,” he added, “and especially the banal imagery emanating from the art world, and made them into something to contemplate.”
Asked how she had dealt with approaching a completely new medium (in this case a novel), Ms. Drexler gave straightforward career advice. In a 2016 Artforum interview, she recalled, “To start, I told myself: Just be honest, say something that means something, and amuse yourself.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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