Rosalyn Drexler, a pioneer of the Pop Art movement – and one of the first women to paint Marilyn Monroe – has died aged 98.

She was born Rosalyn Bronznick in the Bronx, NYC, in 1926. As a child she attended vaudeville shows with her parents, who also encouraged her own creativity. She studied at the High School of Music and Art, majoring in voice, and spent a semester at Hunter College before leaving to marry an expressionist painter, Sherman Drexler, at 19. They raised two children together.

She trained as a professional wrestler, competing in bouts as far afield as Mexico. The Drexlers moved to Berkeley, California, where Sherman was completing his studies, and Rosalyn began making found object sculptures for display in their home. When the couple returned to New York, she began painting while taking a variety of odd jobs on the side.

After her first solo show in 1960 she moved from assemblage to Pop Art, blowing up images from magazines, newspapers and posters, collaging them onto canvas, and painting over them in bright, lurid colours, exploring themes of misogyny, political violence and racism.

She was one of four women among thirty-five artists and photographers featured in Homage to Marilyn Monroe, a 1967 exhibition at the Sidney Janis Gallery, then located near to Marilyn’s former apartment building on East 57th Street. Drexler’s contribution, ‘Something’s Got to Give,’ was an acrylic and paper collage on a 50 x 40 inch canvas.

Named after Monroe’s unfinished last film, it was based on a still photo which showed her kneeling at the edge of a swimming pool, smiling at a little girl in the water. In Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn played Ellen Arden, returning home after being stranded on a desert island to find her life  changed beyond recognition.

Ellen’s daughter Lita, played by five-year-old Alexandra Heilweil, is shown from behind, and her slick, dark hair contrasts with her screen mom’s tousled platinum bob. Drexler has painted over Lita’s white bathing suit (with a cross-strap on the back) and Ellen’s beige overcoat, while eight-year-old Christopher Morley, who played Lita’s brother Tommy, has disappeared – creating a direct line from girl to woman.

Drexler depicted Marilyn in at least two other works, including ‘The Misfits,’ an acrylic and paper collage on 24 x 36 inch canvas. It is based on an image by Cornell Capa, one of several Magnum Agency photographers who documented the making of the movie in 1960. Marilyn and co-star Clark Gable are canoodling in the front-seat of a car. Her blonde hair is painted yellow, while his cowboy hat is blue. Their reddish-brown skin nods to the film’s desert setting, but the ‘green-screen’ backdrop reminds us that cinema is built on illusions. And while her delight is evident, his expression is harder to read.

One of Drexler’s most famous works was unveiled as part of her 1967 collection, Men and Machines, although its creation dates back to 1963, a year after Marilyn’s death. Unlike her other Monroe-inspired works, it isn’t based on a film still, but a press photo depicting a traumatic event from Marilyn’s life, seen through a paparazzi lens.

“A real thing happens so it can be appropriated as a reminder,” Drexler told L’Etage Magazine. The source image was shot outside Arthur Miller’s home in Roxbury, Connecticut on June 29, 1956, when the media frenzy over his upcoming wedding claimed two lives.

A group of press representatives stand by watching Marilyn Monroe rush into the home of her groom to be, playwright Arthur Miller. Miss Monroe was ashen faced and quivering as she dashed into the house after witnessing the crackup of a car in which a pair of magazine correspondents were racing to catch up with Miller and Monroe as they headed for Miller’s home from a neighbour’s house. The injured correspondents were Mara Scherbatoff, of the French magazine Paris Match and an assistant, Ira Slade. The incident caused Miller to tell newsmen, ‘I knew this would happen. This terrible thing explains why I’m not going to say when and where we’ll be married. I think it’s time enough for everybody to know when it happens.’

In Drexler’s acrylic and paper collage on 50 x 40 inch canvas, the bystanders have been removed, except for one man directly behind Marilyn – not a journalist, as some have assumed, but Miller’s brother, Kermit. The title, ‘Marilyn Pursued by Death,’ is worthy of a tabloid headline reporting the star’s demise. Immaculately coiffed and oddly poised, with sunglasses masking her panic, she nonetheless seems ill-fitted for escape in her stiletto heels. The country scene has also been erased and painted black, with both figures rendered in spectral greyscale, their bodies outlined in blood red.

Although her work was critically praised, Rosalyn never attained the fame of male peers like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. “I was happy being productive and having good friends and being ignored,” she recalled. “But now I’m getting angry about it, looking back!”

In addition to her art, she published books and produced her own plays. Under a pseudonym, she wrote ‘novelisations’ of popular movies, including Rocky (1976.) At the same time, she worked as a singer in nightclubs.

Her first retrospective was held in 1986, and her artistic reputation has grown in the 21st century. Her daughter Rachel died in 2010, and after almost 70 years of marriage, she lost her husband in 2014.

‘The Misfits’ and ‘Marilyn Pursued by Death’ were featured in a 2015 retrospective, Rosalyn Drexler: Vulgar Lives, and the latter painting is currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The whereabouts of ‘Something’s Got to Give’ is unclear, but her work will be featured in Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London in June 2026.

Rosalyn Drexler died on September 3, 2025, and is survived by her son, Daniel.