Rosalyn Drexler

Based on Wikipedia: Rosalyn Drexler

The Mexican Spitfire Who Painted Violence

Before she became one of the overlooked pioneers of Pop Art, before she won an Obie Award for playwriting and an Emmy for screenwriting, before she ghostwrote the novelization of Rocky under a pseudonym—Rosalyn Drexler wrestled professionally under the name Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire.

She wrestled in graveyards. She wrestled in airplane hangars. She learned to throw her opponents without actually hurting them, and to slam the mat hard enough that audiences in the cheap seats could hear the impact. Andy Warhol later made a series of silkscreen paintings based on a photograph of her in character.

This detail alone would make for an interesting life. But Drexler, who lived from 1926 to 2025—dying just shy of her ninety-ninth birthday—seemed constitutionally incapable of doing just one thing. She was a novelist, a playwright, a screenwriter, a sculptor, and a painter whose work anticipated feminist art by decades while she herself resisted the label. She was, in the truest sense of an overused word, a polymath.

A Bronx Childhood and an Early Exit from College

Rosalyn Bronznick grew up in the Bronx and East Harlem during the Depression and World War II years. Her parents took her to vaudeville shows—those variety performances that were the dominant form of American popular entertainment before television killed them off. They bought her art posters, coloring books, crayons. These weren't wealthy people making strategic investments in their daughter's artistic development. They were working-class New Yorkers who happened to value creativity.

She attended the High School of Music and Art, one of New York City's specialized public schools where admission was competitive and the curriculum rigorous. Her major was voice—singing, not visual art. She went to Hunter College for exactly one semester before dropping out at nineteen to marry Sherman Drexler, a figure painter. She became his frequent subject, appearing in canvas after canvas over their long marriage.

The decision to leave college might seem like an abandonment of her own ambitions for the sake of a husband's career. In retrospect, it looks more like impatience. Rosalyn Drexler would spend the rest of her life teaching herself things—sculpture, painting, writing—without waiting for institutional permission.

Into the Ring

In 1951, the Drexlers were living in Hell's Kitchen, a Manhattan neighborhood that wouldn't gentrify for another fifty years. Near their apartment was Bothner's Gymnasium, where women professional wrestlers trained. A friend suggested Rosalyn might enjoy trying it.

Professional wrestling occupies a strange space in American culture—simultaneously athletic and theatrical, demanding genuine physical skill while following predetermined outcomes. The wrestlers of the 1950s weren't the steroid-inflated performers of later decades. They were working entertainers who traveled from town to town, performing in whatever venue would have them.

Drexler learned the craft. She created a character. As Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire, she toured the country, traveling through the Jim Crow South where segregated seating and separate water fountains reminded her constantly that American equality was a fiction. The experience was formative in ways she wouldn't fully process for twenty years.

She hated it. She came home after witnessing too much racism to stomach. But she was also a writer, which means nothing gets wasted.

"I thought it should not be wasted, and I should at least get a book out of it."

That book, To Smithereens, came out in 1972 to critical acclaim. In 2025, it was republished by Hagfish Press and named one of the New York Times's hundred notable books of the year—more than fifty years after its original publication. The novel became the basis for the 1980 film Below the Belt, a title Drexler found absurd. "It's not a wrestling title at all," she complained. The producers told her it sounded sexy.

At fifty-four, she entered a powerlifting competition. She didn't win, but the fact that she tried tells you something about her relationship with her own body and its capabilities.

From Sculpture to Pop

While her husband finished his art degree at Berkeley in the mid-1950s, Drexler began making sculptures for their home. These weren't the polished bronzes of traditional sculpture. They were found-object assemblages—plaster built up around scrap metal and wood armatures, influenced by the rough, spontaneous aesthetic of Abstract Expressionism and Beat culture.

She showed these works alongside her husband's paintings in 1955. The sculptor David Smith and the art dealer Ivan Karp encouraged her to continue. When the Drexlers moved back to New York, her work appeared at the Reuben Gallery, a short-lived but influential space where Happenings—those strange performance-art events of the early 1960s—took place. Franz Kline, one of the major Abstract Expressionist painters, praised her work.

Then the Reuben Gallery closed, and no other gallery offered to represent her.

"Women were not bankable at the time."

So she pivoted. If no one would show her sculptures, she would make paintings instead. She supported herself with odd jobs—waitress, cigarette girl, hatcheck attendant, masseuse—while she figured out what kind of painter she wanted to be.

Pop Art and Its Discontents

By 1961, Drexler had found her method. She collected old magazines, posters, and newspapers, searching for images that caught her attention. She would enlarge these images, collage them onto canvas, and then paint over them in bright, saturated colors. The process was entirely self-taught. She worked wherever she could—usually at home, since she never had her own studio.

She had a particular fondness for Elmer's Glue. "It doesn't get enough credit for its role in art," she once said.

In January 1964, her work appeared in something called the "First International Girlie Exhibit" at Pace Gallery. The title sounds like a joke, but it was a real show featuring work by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Tom Wesselmann—all men who had made art using images of women's bodies sourced from popular media. Drexler and Marjorie Strider were the only female artists included.

Drexler showed collages made from girlie magazines. Some viewers were scandalized. One critic praised her "virtuosic, uninhibited imagination" and her "frank expression of brutality, desire, pathos and playfulness."

That word—brutality—would define much of her subsequent work.

The Love and Violence Series

Pop Art, as practiced by Warhol and Lichtenstein, cultivated a kind of cool detachment. Their work reproduced images from consumer culture—soup cans, comic strips, movie stars—without apparent commentary or emotional investment. The style was deliberately flat, refusing the tortured self-expression of Abstract Expressionism.

Drexler's paintings looked like Pop Art. They used the same techniques of appropriation and bright color. But they were about something her male colleagues avoided: violence against women.

Her series called The Love and Violence depicts scenes that evoke pulp fiction covers, B-movie posters, and film noir. The paintings have titles like I Won't Hurt You (1964), This is My Wedding (1963), and Rape (1962). Men grab women. Women struggle. The compositions suggest both desire and danger, seduction and assault.

In some paintings, the dynamic is more ambiguous. Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) and Dangerous Liaison (1963) leave open the question of who has power over whom. This ambiguity makes the work more disturbing, not less. We're accustomed to clear victims and villains. Drexler showed us that real violence often happens in relationships where the power dynamics shift and blur.

She was interested in women's roles as they appeared in cheap entertainment—the moll, the femme fatale, the home wrecker. These were female archetypes defined by sexuality and moral failing, characters who existed to be punished for transgressing social norms. Drexler painted them without judgment, presenting the images straight while the violent context spoke for itself.

Race, Power, and the American Century

Her wrestling tour through the segregated South had left marks. In 1966, she made a painting called Is It True What They Say About Dixie?, based on a newspaper photograph of Bull Connor.

If you don't recognize that name: Theophilus Eugene "Bull" Connor was the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama, who in 1963 ordered police to attack civil rights demonstrators with fire hoses and police dogs. The photographs of children being knocked down by high-pressure water became defining images of the movement, helping to shift Northern white opinion against segregation.

Drexler's painting shows Connor leading a group of white men in black suits against a stark white background. They advance toward the viewer. The title comes from a popular song of the 1930s, a nostalgic number about the romantic South of magnolias and moonlight. The irony is brutal.

A similar painting, F.B.I. (1964), depicts government agents in a way that simultaneously glamorizes them and questions their authority. The painting appeared during the height of J. Edgar Hoover's power, when the Bureau was conducting illegal surveillance of civil rights leaders while largely ignoring organized crime.

Her Men and Machines series showed working men with industrial equipment, playing on the obvious phallic symbolism while also capturing something about Cold War masculinity—the celebration of technological power, the fusion of man and machine, the understanding that American greatness depended on factories and rockets and the men who operated them.

One painting from 1967, Marilyn Pursued by Death, shows Marilyn Monroe being followed by a male figure. The man looks like a stalker or a particularly aggressive paparazzo. In fact, the source photograph reveals he was her bodyguard. The painting works precisely because we misread it—we see threat where there was protection, danger where there was care. Our assumptions about how men pursue women are built into how we see.

Overlooked Among the Famous

Drexler knew the major figures of her era. Franz Kline and Bill and Elaine de Kooning were close friends of the Drexlers. She had connections to Eva Hesse, the sculptor who died young and became legendary; George Segal, who made those ghostly white plaster figures; Claes Oldenburg, who turned everyday objects into giant soft sculptures; and Alice Neel, the portrait painter who was herself overlooked for decades before her rediscovery.

Despite these connections, despite favorable reviews, despite showing in major Pop Art exhibitions throughout the 1960s, Drexler never achieved the recognition of her male peers.

The reasons are obvious in retrospect. She was a woman in a male-dominated scene. More importantly, her subject matter—violence, racism, the abuse of power—was uncomfortable. Pop Art was supposed to be cool, detached, ironic. Drexler's work forced viewers to look at things they preferred to ignore.

"I was happy being productive and having good friends and being ignored. But now I'm getting angry about it, looking back!"

The Feminist Question

Art historians would eventually identify Drexler's Pop paintings as early feminist artworks. She objected to this categorization.

This resistance might seem strange. Her paintings clearly address violence against women. They obviously critique how popular culture represents female bodies and female suffering. What could be more feminist?

But Drexler belonged to a generation of women artists who had complicated relationships with the feminist movement. Some worried that being labeled "feminist" would ghettoize their work, consigning them to a subcategory rather than being judged on the same terms as their male peers. Some simply made work about their own experiences and observations without consciously intending political commentary.

There's also a simpler explanation: artists often don't like being told what their work means. They make images that feel necessary and resist having those images reduced to slogans or positions.

Whatever her stated views on feminism, Drexler did take political action. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, publicly committing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. This was a significant act of civil disobedience during a time when opposing the war could have real social and legal consequences.

The Writer's Life

Painting was only one of Drexler's careers. She was also a prolific writer—novelist, playwright, screenwriter.

Her first novel, I Am the Beautiful Stranger, appeared in 1965. To Smithereens, the wrestling novel, came in 1972. She wrote consistently through the 1970s and beyond, producing novels under her own name and, for commercial projects, under the pseudonym Julia Sorel.

It was as Julia Sorel that she wrote novelizations—those odd publishing artifacts where a book is adapted from a screenplay rather than the other way around. She novelized Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, See How She Runs, and most famously, Rocky.

Think about that for a moment. The novelization of one of the most beloved sports movies ever made, the film that launched Sylvester Stallone's career and won the Academy Award for Best Picture, was written by a female Pop artist and professional wrestler who went uncredited on the cover.

Her plays were performed at significant venues throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s—Judson Memorial Church, the Manhattan Theatre Club, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Theater for the New City. She won an Obie Award, the off-Broadway equivalent of a Tony. In 1973, she was one of fifteen writers on a CBS comedy special called Lily, starring Lily Tomlin alongside Alan Alda and Richard Pryor. That writing credit earned her an Emmy.

Recognition Delayed

For decades, Drexler continued working while remaining largely unknown to the broader public. Her paintings sold. Her plays were performed. Her books were published. But she wasn't part of the standard narrative of American Pop Art, which focused on Warhol, Lichtenstein, Wesselmann, James Rosenquist.

In 2018, at age ninety-one, she finally received a career retrospective at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Critics who had never heard of her discovered a body of work that anticipated feminist art, that engaged with violence and power in ways more confrontational than any of the canonical Pop artists, that demonstrated genuine painterly skill alongside conceptual sophistication.

In 2022, the Hirshhorn Museum—one of the Smithsonian's modern art institutions—mounted an exhibition called "Put It This Way: (Re)visions of The Hirshhorn Collection." The title referenced Drexler's 1963 painting of the same name. The show ran through fall 2023, introducing her work to visitors who might have walked past a Warhol or Lichtenstein thousands of times without ever encountering her name.

What We Lose When We Forget

Rosalyn Drexler died on September 3, 2025, having lived through the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the September 11 attacks, and the rise of artificial intelligence. She was a young woman when Jackson Pollock was dripping paint and an old woman when artists began generating images with text prompts.

She made work about violence against women before second-wave feminism had a name. She painted racial violence before the Civil Rights Act passed. She depicted the cold glamour of American power at the height of American empire.

And for most of her career, she was overlooked.

This isn't a tragedy in the conventional sense. Drexler had a long, productive life. She had friends, a long marriage, children. She made the work she wanted to make. She was, by her own account, happy enough being ignored.

But it does raise questions about what we lose when certain artists are written out of history—or, more precisely, never written in. The standard narrative of Pop Art emphasizes surface, irony, cool detachment. Drexler's work suggests the movement was capable of deeper engagement than we usually acknowledge. What else have we missed because it didn't fit the story we wanted to tell?

Her final decades brought belated recognition. The Rose Art Museum retrospective, the Hirshhorn show, the republication of To Smithereens, her inclusion in conversations about feminist art history—all of this happened while she was still alive to see it.

Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire, wrestled in graveyards and airplane hangars, quit because she couldn't stand Southern racism, and got a book out of it. Rosalyn Drexler painted the violence that Pop Art preferred to ignore, wrote novels under a pseudonym, won an Emmy, lived almost a century, and finally got the recognition she'd earned.

She was ninety-eight years old. Better late than never, though one wishes it hadn't been so late.