- International PopOur PickBy Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan
- Pop Art (World of Art)Our PickBy Lucy Lippard
- Rosalyn Drexler: Vulgar LivesBy Rosalyn Drexler
- The World Goes PopOur PickBy Jessica Morgan and Flavia Frigeri
- Women, Art, and Society (World of Art) Fourth EditionOur PickBy Whitney Chadwick
Important Art by Rosalyn Drexler
Put it This Way (1963)
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.
Kiss Me, Stupid (1964)
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.
Marilyn Pursued by Death (1963)
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.