Lynne Drexler
An Abstract Expressionist and student of both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) established a distinctive stylistic idiom through vibrantly contrasting hues, applied in swatch-like patches with a Pointillist dynamism. Born in 1928 near Newport News, Virginia, Drexler studied drama at the Richmond Professional Institute from which she graduated in 1949. After an illness, she took art courses at the College of William & Mary and was encouraged by several mentors to move to New York and study with Hans Hofmann, which she did in 1956. Drexler studied at Hunter College with Robert Motherwell, who encouraged her to believe she could make a living as an artist.
An Abstract Expressionist and student of both Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) established a distinctive stylistic idiom through vibrantly contrasting hues, applied in swatch-like patches with a Pointillist dynamism. Born in 1928 near Newport News, Virginia, Drexler studied drama at the Richmond Professional Institute from which she graduated in 1949. After an illness, she took art courses at the College of William & Mary and was encouraged by several mentors to move to New York and study with Hans Hofmann, which she did in 1956. Drexler studied at Hunter College with Robert Motherwell, who encouraged her to believe she could make a living as an artist.
Drexler began exhibiting her works in the late 1950s, and by 1959, she had developed her signature brushwork: swatch-like strokes in dense clusters, which allow color, not geometry, to triumph. She joined the dynamic art scene in Greenwich Village, frequenting the Cedar Tavern and the 8th Street Artist Club’s events. Drexler had her first solo exhibition in February of 1961 at Tanager Gallery, New York, whose founding members include Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, and Philip Pearlstein.
In 1962 at a Halloween dance at “The Club,” Drexler met her future husband, John Hultberg. Drexler and Hultberg were married in 1962 and took their honeymoon in Maine, where he had a house on Monhegan Island. This would be the introduction to the place that would become so significant to Drexler’s life and art. That summer Drexler incorporated the shapes and colors of Monhegan into her work. She continued to translate these memories of Maine into her paintings during the winter in her studio in New York.
After her exhibition at Tanager, Drexler only showed sporadically in the succeeding decades. She felt alienated from the New York art scene, as trends moved towards Pop Art. In the early 1970s, she and Hultberg bought the Monhegan house and by the early 1980s, Drexler was living without Hultberg full time on the island. During the last two decades of her life, Drexler’s art became more representational, including elements of her coastal surroundings, still lifes, and a series of paintings incorporating dolls and masks. In her later years, Drexler developed more renown locally in New York with several solo shows held in Maine galleries. Drexler died of cancer in 1999.
An early critic compared Drexler’s work to that of Van Gogh, but he might have also compared the high drama of their lives, a story narrated in Berry Campbell and Mnuchin Gallery’s 2022 exhibition catalogue essay by Gail Levin. Admiration for Drexler’s art gathered steam in the years following her death, when solo exhibitions of her work were held at Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine (2003), the Monhegan Museum (2008), and the Portland Museum of Art, Maine (2009). Since 2022, Drexler has been the subject of dozens of articles in publications such as The New York Times and The Financial Times, including many others.
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