SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Rosalyn Drexler was a pop artist icon, a novelist, a playwright, a singer, a mother. She simply could not be boxed in, and she did not want to be defined.
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ROSALYN DREXLER: I never sat down and said, hey, what are you today? I was always doing what was natural to me and right, things like sex and fights and making food.
DETROW: That's Drexler speaking with Artforum magazine in 2016.
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DREXLER: It was all of one piece in the life. It's a continuum of activities that are satisfying.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Drexler died earlier this week. She was 98.
SID SACHS: Her life is - was kind of surreal. Like, she was related to one of the Marx Brothers. She sang. She wrote musicals. Danny Devito was in one of her plays with Judd Hirsch.
SUMMERS: That is Sid Sachs, Drexler's close friend and former director of exhibitions at the University of the Arts.
SACHS: She had great integrity and great intelligence. She had a sense of humor that she was able to use and also a sense of maybe tragedy, also.
DETROW: As a pop artist, Drexler used movie posters, magazines, and newspapers as canvas to illuminate the world around her through prosaic and gritty imagery. Sachs says the inspiration behind much of her visual art came from enduring the Depression era, growing up in the Bronx and from her deep love of reading.
SACHS: Literature, I think, was her mainstay, and she absorbed all the language plays and her intelligence from reading. And then she was able to use that in making her pop art.
SUMMERS: She described her bump-in with writing in a Smithsonian oral history interview.
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DREXLER: All I had was a paragraph or two, and this guy said, I want to publish you. I said, OK. He said, I'll be back in two years and get me your book. I said, OK.
SUMMERS: One of her novels, "The Cosmopolitan Girl," is about a woman's love affair with a talking dog. Another is an adaptation of Sylvester Stallone's film "Rocky," and yet another called "The Smithereens" (ph) is about a female wrestler named Rosa.
DETROW: Which checks out because among Drexler's accolades was a stint as a professional wrestler. She was prolific in the final years of her life. The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University held a major retrospective exhibition of Drexler's work in 2016. Her art also lives on at major museum collections, like the Museum of Modern Art.
SUMMERS: Sid Sachs says he'd been trying to catch up with his old friend in the weeks before her death.
SACHS: And I - as I'm talking to you, I'm almost crying. But I - she was a really wonderful person. And some of the artists are not wonderful people. So to be a wonderful person and an artist and a writer and to have touched that many people is marvelous and sublime.
SUMMERS: In Drexler's own words, it was a rich life.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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