Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Art Does Exist by Rosalyn Drexler DREXLER, Rosalyn 1926- PERSONAL: Born November 25, 1926, in New York, New York; daughter of George and Hilda (maiden name, Sherman) Bronznick; married Sherman Drexler, 1946; children: one daughter, one son. ADDRESSES: Home— 60 Union St., #1S, Newark, NJ 07105-1430. Agent— Georges Borchardt, 136 East 57th St., New York, NY 10022 (literary); Helen Harvey Associates, 410 West 24th St., New York, NY 10011 (drama). E-mail— [email protected] CAREER: Playwright, novelist, and painter. Worked briefly as a professional wrestler; taught at Writer's Workshop, University of Iowa, 1976-77; taught art at University of Colorado. Has held one-woman art shows at galleries in New York City, Boston, and Provincetown, RI; her work has been included in group shows at Martha-Jackson, Pace Gallery, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum. MEMBER: New Dramatists, New York Theatre Strategy, Dramatists Guild, PEN, Actors Studio. AWARDS, HONORS: Obie Awards from Village Voice, 1964, for Home Movies, 1979, and 1985; MacDowell fellowship, 1965; Rockefeller grant, 1965, 1968, and 1974; humor prize from Paris Review, 1966, for short story, "Dear"; Guggenheim fellowship, 1970-71; Emmy Award for writing excellence from Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, 1974, for The Lily Show. WRITINGS: NOVELS. I Am the Beautiful Stranger, Grossman (New York, NY), 1965. One or Another, Dutton (New York, NY), 1970. To Smithereens, New American Library (New York, NY), 1972, published as Submissions of a Lady Wrestler, Mayflower (London, England), 1976. The Cosmopolitan Girl, M. Evans (New York, NY), 1974. Starborn: The Story of Jenni Love, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1979. Tomorrow Is Sometimes Temporary When Tomorrow Rolls Around, Simon & Schuster (New York), 1979. Bad Guy, Dutton (New York, NY), 1982. Art Does (Not) Exist, Northwestern University Press (Evanston, IL), 1996. Dear, Applause (New York, NY), 1997. UNDER PSEUDONYM JULIA SOREL. Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1976. Alex: Portrait of a Teenage Prostitute, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1977. Rocky, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1977. See How She Runs, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1978. PLAYS. The Line of Least Existence and Other Plays, introduction by Richard Gilman, (includes Home Movies [produced in New York City at Judson Poet's Theatre, 1964], Hot Buttered Roll [produced in New York City at New Dramatists Committee, 1966], The Investigation [produced in Boston at Theatre Co. of Boston; first produced in New York City at New Dramatists Committee, 1966], The Bed Was Full [produced at New Dramatists Committee, 1967], The Line of Least Existence [produced at Judson Poets' Theatre, March 15, 1968], and Softly, and Consider the Nearness [produced in New York City at St. Luke's Church, 1969]), Random House (New York, NY), 1967. (With others) Collision Course (twelve plays; includes Skywriting by Drexler; produced together in New York City at Cafe au Go Go, May 8, 1968), Random House (New York, NY), 1968. The Investigation [and] Hot Buttered Roll, Methuen (London, England), 1969. Was I Good?, produced by New Dramatists Committee, 1972. The Ice Queen, produced in Boston at The Proposition, 1973. She Who Was He, produced in Richmond, Va., at Virginia Commonwealth University, 1974. Travesty Parade, produced in Los Angeles at Center Theatre Group, 1974. Vulgar Lives, produced in New York City at Theatre Strategy, 1979. The Writer's Opera, produced in New York City at TNC, 1979. Graven Image, produced in New York City, 1980. Starburn, produced in New York City, 1983. Room 17-C, produced in Omaha, 1983. Delicate Feelings, produced in New York City, 1984. Transients Welcome, Broadway Play Publishing (New York, NY), 1986. A Matter of Life and Death, produced in New York City, 1986. What Do You Call It?, produced in New York City, 1986. The Heart That Eats Itself, produced in New York City, 1987. The Flood, produced in 1992. OTHER. Rosalyn Drexler: Intimate Emotions, Grey Art Gallery, New York University (New York, NY), 1986. Work represented in anthologies, including The Bold New Women, Fawcett, 1966; New American Review, New American Library, 1969; and The Off-Off Broadway Book, 1972. Author of screenplay Naked Came the Stranger ; of television script The Lily Show ; and Cara Pina, 1992. Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Esquire, Village Voice, and Mademoiselle. Film reviewer for Vogue. SIDELIGHTS: Rosalyn Drexler's dramatic work is based in "a reaction against the intellectualism and pretentiousness which surrounded the theatre of the absurd," as Howard McNaughton wrote in Contemporary Dramatists. Her own dramatic works display a verbal dexterity and a delight in lampooning the avant garde art world. "Few contemporary playwrights can equal her verbal playfulness, fearless spontaneity, and boundless irreverence," Michael Smith wrote. "Few in fact, share her devotion to pure writing, preferring their language functional, meaningful, or psychologically 'real.'" Jack Kroll commented: "Drexler presents the spectacle of a playwright with a brilliant gift, not only for language, but for making language work on many levels with the ease and excitement of a Cossack riding his horse everywhere but in the saddle." She has garnered three Obie Awards for her dramatic works. Drexler's novels are humorous slapstick romps that critics have compared to both Kafka and the Marx Brothers. In addition to succeeding as a playwright and novelist, Drexler is also a painter, whose art has been shown in New York City venues. The play The Line of Least Existence, which Kroll found to be "about the total dissonance that occurs whenever living creatures find themselves in any sort of relationship," was deemed by him to be evidence of Drexler's "sweet shrewdness that seems to be talking straight to the most hidden part of you. She has the great and necessary gift of fashioning a new, total innocence out of the total corruption that she clearly sees. With lots of laughs." McNaughton noted in The Line of Least Existence "an utterly unpretentious playfulness, in which words are discovered and traded just for their phatic values." Drexler's play Hot Buttered Roll features an aging billionaire, a callgirl hired to entertain him, and a female bodyguard. "The play's central image," McNaughton admitted, "is never clearly stated, but seems to be that of (gendered) man as a sort of transplant patient, his facilities being monitored externally, his needs being canvassed through a huge mail-order system." Benedict Nightingale praised how Drexler uses a preoccupation with "sterile hedonism and dead feelings" to create "arresting dramatic terms." Published in England in the same volume with Hot Buttered Roll was Drexler's The Investigation, which depicts the police interrogation of a juvenile suspected of murder. According to Contemporary Dramatists, the detective conducting the interrogation "is so resourceful that his techniques of sadistic attrition become the main theatrical dynamic." Skywriting, in the words of the same source, contains "only two characters. . . . The unnamed man and woman . . . who are segregated on either side of the stage, argue about the possession of a huge (projected) picture postcard of clouds." The author of the Contemporary Dramatists entry went on to conclude that Skywriting "is a very clever and economical play, in which the primordial merges with the futuristic." Drexler's first novel, 1965's I Am the Beautiful Stranger, is the "vital, intense 'diary' of one Selma Silver," as Maggie Rennert in Book Week put it. Rennert went on to maintain that Selma's story, as a teenager growing up during the 1930s, "is swift, complete, individual, and universal." Speaking of Drexler's novel One or Another, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times wrote: "Rosalyn Drexler may very well be the first Marx Sister." Lehmann-Haupt described the novel as being filled with "so many sight, sound and word gags, so many sillinesses and surrealistic—not to mention little grinning obscenities—that the reader soon begins to flinch in anticipation of the next verbal skit and to bark with relieved laughter when it works." Kroll contended that Drexler belongs with Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon as representatives of the "new literary voice." He explained: "The new literary voice comes from some odd and perilous psychic area still being charted, some basic metabolic flashpoint where the self struggles to convert its recurrent breakdowns into new holds on life and reality. . . . Drexler is . . . funny, scary, preternaturally aware she is at the exact center where the new sensibility is being put together cell by cell." Drexler's exuberant style does not always earn critical acclaim. The novel To Smithereens fared less well with critics, though undoubtedly the author drew upon her experience as a women's wrestler to write it. Michael Wood praised the humor and intelligence of the novel and noted that the language "has confidence in its capacity to render precisely the perceptions it is supposed to render." But Anatole Broyard wrote that Drexler "seems almost to strain for irrelevancy, to struggle through a strenuous willed-free association in search of a fashionable zaniness." A critic for the Times Literary Supplement found that "the strength of Miss Drexler's writing is in the energy of her prose: every joke is cleancut. And yet she refuses to go inside, to go deeper into her characters' psyches. She has a natural eye and ear but her mistake is in assuming that the number of empty gaps, the things not said, will indicate, or evoke, the emptiness of the lives she has created." Another of Drexler's novels is Bad Guy. This book, according to Dana Sonnenschein and Juliet Byington in American Women Writers, is "about a therapist who uses dream interpretation and psychodrama to treat a teenage rapist/murderer whose role models have all been television characters." In the author's The Cosmopolitan Girl, Sara Sanborn in the New York Times Book Review noted that Drexler "weaves a seamy web of parodies that covers the situation perfectly," and stated further that the novel "is a send-up and send-off for the New Woman." Sara Blackburn in Book World assessed Drexler's work as a novelist: "She's an absolute original who can take all of the ingredients that usually characterize 'serious' fiction . . . and use them with inventiveness, playfulness, and even hilarity. Wonderfully, it works, and the result is admirable not only for its style and wit, but for its lack of pretense, for the respect it grants its reader in not straining beyond its materials, and for what it achieves; art which is also high entertainment." BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: BOOKS. American Women Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999. Contemporary Dramatists, 6th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999. Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2, 1974, Volume 6, 1976. Drexler, Rosalyn, Rosalyn Drexler: Intimate Emotions, Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 1986. PERIODICALS. American Theatre, December, 1993, p. 58. Art in America, September, 2000, Michael Duncan, "Rosalyn Drexler at Mitchell Algus and Nicholas Davies." Books and Bookmen, June, 1967. Book Week, June 27, 1965, Maggie Rennert, review of I Am the Beautiful Stranger, p. 22. Book World, March 19, 1972, Sara Blackburn, review of To Smithereens, p. 5. Ms., July, 1975. Nation, August 31, 1970. New Statesman, February 27, 1969. Newsweek, April 1, 1968; February 9, 1970; June 1, 1970, Jack Kroll, review of One or Another, p. 87; March 10, 1975. New York Review of Books, August 10, 1972, Michael Wood, review of To Smithereens, p. 14. New York Times, June 5, 1970; February 21, 1972. New York Times Book Review, June 28, 1970; March 30, 1975, Sara Sanborn, review of The Cosmopolitan Girl, p. 4. Publishers Weekly, February 12, 1996, p. 59. Times Literary Supplement, September 14, 1973. Village Voice, March 28, 1968, Michael Smith, review of The Line of Least Existence, p. 50.* Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. MLA Chicago APA. "Drexler, Rosalyn 1926- ." Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series . . Encyclopedia.com. 18 Jun. 2021 < https://www.encyclopedia.com > . "Drexler, Rosalyn 1926- ." Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series . . Encyclopedia.com. (June 18, 2021). https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/drexler-rosalyn-1926. "Drexler, Rosalyn 1926- ." Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series . . Retrieved June 18, 2021 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/drexler-rosalyn-1926. Citation styles. Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list. Rosalyn Drexler Artworks. Put it This Way portrays the moment of action just after a man wearing a suit, positioned in the center of the canvas, has slapped the woman positioned below him. His right arm is extended across his body, hand open, inches from her shoulder, whilst the woman, dressed in a low cut dress, faces out towards the right of the canvas. Her head is thrown back with her shoulder-length hair flowing behind her as if she is reeling from the slap. The figures are rendered in black and white oil paint, augmented with the vivid splashes of color found in the man's bright blue tie and the woman's yellow dress. The scene is made more vibrant and the figures more stark by their placement on an electric blue background. Like many artists connected with Pop Art in the 1960s, Drexler often used images from films to create her works, especially dark, foreboding film noir -esque images as she does here. Drexler repurposes them in a collage fashion and combines them with bright colors. Drexler used theses images to make an explicitly feminist critique, as this painting demonstrates. Popular culture of the time, and particularly film, often objectified women, placing them in roles in which they were either a villain or a victim. In a film, the act of a slap is but a quickly passing moment; but when isolated as it is here, the viewer is forced to acknowledge and confront the violent act. By identifying these moments, and reconfiguring them in her Pop-influenced style, Drexler draws attention to narrative generalizations about women and assert that the female identify is more than the narrowly defined male stereotype. Collection of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Kiss Me, Stupid. Set against a bright orange background, Kiss Me, Stupid consists of a black and white image of a couple kissing in the right foreground of the painted canvas. The man is seen from the back, wearing a red turtleneck. The woman he kisses is positioned with her face visible to the viewer with her eyes closed. She seems to be attempting to reach her left hand towards the man but he restrains her with his right fist clenched around her wrist. A common theme in Drexler's art are collaged images of couples embracing, referencing movies and other media. The bright colors and the what - at a quick glance - can seem to be a voyeuristic intrusion on a romantic moment belies a deeper, more sinister element to the work which is discovered upon closer inspection. While the viewers eyes are first drawn to the embrace itself, it is jarring to realize that what at first seemed a consensual act may not be. The man's forceful restraining of the woman's hand as she reaches up and away from the embrace could suggest an attempt to break away or physical coercion. The movie couples of Drexler's work, as described by art historian Kalliopi Minioudaki, ". unveil violence and subjugation as the predicament of woman in love in Western society" and furthermore, through these works, "Drexler matched her exposure of women's abuse with critical contemplation of romance and its media stereotypes. Acrylic paint and paper collage on canvas - Collection of Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, New York. Marilyn Pursued by Death. Marilyn Pursued by Death features the Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe in a black skirt, white shirt and black sunglasses hurriedly rushing as if in an attempt to move off the right side of the canvas on which she is painted. Behind her a man in black pants, white shirt, and black sunglasses pursues her. Both figures are outlined in red, which makes their figures stand out vibrantly against the black background. Drexler's depiction of Monroe is full of motion, a figure imbued with a sense of animation and vitality. Unlike other Pop artists who also used images of the famous actress as a subject, such as Andy Warhol, here the actress is not simply a two-dimensional subject. In this work, Drexler uses Monroe as a vehicle to implicitly make statements about the treatment of women in society. Despite her talent, Monroe was objectified by men and treated as a subject more than a person, as seen here as she is relentlessly pursued by a paparazzo, fan or admirer. Whilst the original photograph upon which this image is based shows that the man is in fact Monroe's bodyguard, Drexler's repurposing allows Monroe to become a representation of the objectification of women and their fight to rise above having their worth defined by just the male gaze. Acrylic and paper collage on canvas - Collection of Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, NY. Night Visitors. A brightly colored painting, Night Visitors features a dead man in a black suit slumped on a bright green floral design sofa in the right foreground. He is laying in a pool of blood that has dripped and started to collect at his feet. To his left is a large window framed with curtains that match the sofa. Outside a silver pathway shows four men in suits and hats walking ominously towards the house. Whilst reminiscent of her work in the 1960s, for which Drexler is perhaps best known, later works like this painting are important in that they show her development by suggesting more involved and complicated narratives. Still using themes from popular culture and news sources, this work was based on a death scene photograph of famous gangster Bugsy Sigel. Federal agents are on their way to the house and the viewer is a part of the moment before they encounter the dead criminal. Although referencing this image, the narrative is full of a sense of ambiguity and mystery which Drexler wants the viewer to contemplate. While continuing to focus on issues and imagery relating to violence that permeates the mass media, Drexler has moved beyond only representing acts perpetrated towards women by men and now is making a broader statement about violence and its media representation. As with her earlier works Drexler is importantly asking the viewer to look beyond or go deeper than what is framed in a still image and seek the fuller story beyond the curated media image. Rosalyn Drexler. Learn about exhibitions, events, and initiatives at Albright-Knox Northland and around Buffalo Niagara. Albright-Knox Art Gallery 1285 Elmwood Avenue Buffalo, New York 14222 Closed for construction. Albright-Knox Northland 612 Northland Avenue Buffalo, New York 14211 Plan Your Visit 716.882.8700 | [email protected]. Albright-Knox Northland More. Hervé Tullet: Shape and Color June 26–September 12, 2021. Building the Buffalo AKG. Gilbane Building Company is currently erecting the steel frame of the new Gundlach Building. Learn More. Rosalyn Drexler. Rosalyn Drexler (born 25 November, 1926) is an American artist, novelist, Obie Award-winning playwright, and Emmy Award-winning screenwriter, and former professional wrestler. Although her early work was in sculpture, she was better known for her multimedia pop culture assemblages of found objects and her paintings, which included found images. Recently, her work has received renewed critical attention and a retrospective exhibition of her career opened at the Rose Art Museum in February 2016. Currently, in 2017, Drexler lives and works in New York, New York. Drexler (née Bronznick) was born in 1926 in the Bronx, New York. She grew up in the Bronx and East Harlem, New York. Drexler had considerable exposure to the performing arts as a child, attending vaudeville acts with her friends and family. Her parents also exposed her to the visual arts at an early age, buying her art posters, books, coloring boxes, and crayons, which she has cited as an influence. She attended the High School of Music and Art in New York City where she majored in voice. She attended Hunter College for one semester only before leaving school to marry figure painter Sherman Drexler at 19 in 1946. She is the subject of many of her husband's paintings. Together, they had a daughter and a son. In 1951 the Drexlers lived near Botner's Gymnasium where a number of female professional wrestlers and carnies practiced. Drexler started working out and learning Judo there. She heard of a man, Billy Wolfe, who was organizing a women’s wrestling team. After having to call her husband for permission, she went down in Florida to train, wrestle, and tour under the character of "Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire." She did it out of a need to “get away from this family thing for a while…[it] was too much for [her]". While on tour, she wrestled in odd places such as a graveyard and an airplane-hangar. There is also a photo of her getting ready with an advertisement that she would be fighting Mae Young, a famous professional wrestler. She went on tour around the country, but returned home after becoming upset about racism in the southern states, such as segregated seating and water fountains. Andy Warhol made a series of silkscreen paintings based on a photograph of Drexler as Rosa Carlo. Drexler's experience as Rosa Carlo later formed the basis of her 1972 critically acclaimed novel To Smithereens. She wrote the novel because she hated the experience, but thought it should not be wasted, and she should "at least get a book out of it." The novel was the basis of the 1980 film Below the Belt. The producers contacted Drexler about the title, to which she said that it was “not a wrestling title at all…[but] they said, ‘It sounds sexy.’” When she was 54, she tried getting back into being an athlete and entered a power lifting contest, which she did not win. She has made some paintings based around women’s wrestling, including Take Down (1963), Lost Match (1962), and The Winner (1965). This is a part of the Wikipedia article used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). The full text of the article is here → Rosalyn Drexler. Born in the Bronx, New York in 1926, Rosalyn Drexler first began exhibiting her work during the late 1950s and was a fixture of the Pop Art scene by the early sixties. Appropriating imagery from popular journals and other printed matter, Drexler transforms otherwise prosaic images by adding bright pigments and creating new contexts. Cutting reproductions from magazines, Drexler fixes her strategically selected images to canvas and overpaints the resulting collage, thereby eliminating the visual trace of the underlying, mechanically reproduced images. As with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosalyn Drexler works to challenge the concept of originality along with the role of the painter in an age of mechanical reproduction. Not only creating iconic images, Drexler’s work as well presents a social narrative during a time in which narrative, having been banished by the Abstract Expressionists, was relegated to the speech bubbles in Lichtenstein’s paintings. Behind the tabloid images, her art deals with social issues presented in the vernacular of American 1940s Film Noir and French Nouvelle Vague. Drexler’s imagery is complex and more difficult to immediately recall than that of her contemporaries: her paintings are iconic in incident as well as image. In addition to her work as a visual artist, Drexler is also an accomplished novelist and playwright. She published her first play in 1963 and her first novel in 1965. She is the recipient of three Obie Awards, as well as an Emmy Award for her work on Lily Tomlin’s television special Lily (co- written with Richard Pryor). Notable exhibitions include: Reuben Gallery (1960, New York), Kornblee Gallery (1964, 1965, 1966, New York), Grey Art Gallery, (1986, New York) Pace Gallery (2007, New York), and Garth Greenan Gallery (2015, New York). A survey exhibition, Rosalyn Drexler and the Ends of Man , took place in 2006 at Rutgers University’s Paul Robeson Gallery (Newark, New Jersey). A retrospective exhibition, Rosalyn Drexler: Who Does She Think She Is?, took place at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University (2016, Waltham, Massachusetts); it traveled to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in October 2016 and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in February 2017. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Drexler’s paintings were featured in many important museum exhibitions, such as Pop Art USA (1963, Oakland Art Museum, California), The Painter and the Photograph (1964, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University), American Pop Art (1974, Whitney Museum of American Art), and Another Aspect of Pop Art , (1978, P.S. 1, Institute for Art and Urban Resources). In 2010, her work figured prominently in Sid Sachs’ landmark exhibition Seductive Subversion: Women Pop Artists, 1958–1968 (2010, University of the Arts), Power Up: Female Pop Art (2010 Kunsthalle Wien), Pop to Popism (2014, Australia’s Art Gallery of New South Wales), International Pop , (2015–2016, Walker Art Center, Dallas Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art), and Human Interest , (2016–2017, Whitney Museum of American Art). Drexler’s paintings are in the collections of many museums, including: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery; the Allen Memorial Art Gallery, Oberlin College; the Colby College Museum of Art; the Grey Art Gallery, New York University; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University; the Wadsworth Athenaeum; the Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Rosalyn Drexler is represented exclusively by Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.