Leslie Camhi follows Rosalyn Drexler across novels, Pop art, experimental theatre, and a brief career as a professional wrestler. The reissue of The Cosmopolitan Girl (1974) brings her back into focus: a novelist who punctured feminine respectability with absurdity, rage, and very good jokes.
- Helen Jones, the novel’s young Manhattan narrator, finds her romantic prospects complicated by Pablo, her talking dog. Even his apparently unconditional devotion comes with familiar masculine demands.
- Drexler built paintings from magazine images, newspapers, and B-movie posters, pasting them onto canvas and painting over them. Executives, gangsters, and G-men inhabit the same unnerving American landscape.
- After the Reuben Gallery closed in 1961, many male artists found new representation; Drexler did not. She blamed her sculpture and moved into painting.
- Camhi connects her collage, fragmentation, and movement between media to the demands of housework, child care, paid work, and artistic ambition.
- The essay reports a Garth Greenan exhibition through October 24 and an October 22 Anthology Film Archives screening of the 1975 documentary Who Does She Think She Is?
Her versatility takes on a different meaning against those constraints. Making work from whatever materials and time were available became a way to keep creating while institutions and domestic expectations narrowed her options.
Camhi also keeps the pleasure in view: Drexler’s wordplay and raunchy, ridiculous New York. Her feminist force lives in the work’s unruliness, including its refusal to turn an independent woman’s romantic life into an uplifting fable.