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Lynne Mapp Drexler (1928- 1999)
BATHED IN COLOR

Lynne Mapp Drexler (1928- 1999): BATHED IN COLOR

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Credit: Inside John Legend and Chrissy Teigen’s NYC Home | Architectural Digest
Credit: Inside John Legend and Chrissy Teigen’s NYC Home | Architectural Digest

We are honored to present Lynne Mapp Drexler: Bathed in Color as Moss Galleries inaugural online viewing room, while the physical exhibition at our gallery has been postponed due to the current health crisis. We look forward to welcoming you to visit our Falmouth, Maine gallery to view these rare pieces in person.  Until then, we invite you to explore this rare presentation of never before seen paintings from her 1960's New York City practice as a testimony to her uniquely vibrant, patterned approach to Abstract Expressionism and her lasting influence on subsequent generations of artists.

 

On view beginning August 18, this online exhibition explores the early work of Maine painter Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) with rare, never-before-seen paintings of her work from the 1960s and ’70s. Ten percent of sales from the show will benefit the Monhegan Museum of Art & History on Mohegan Island, the remote retreat off the coast of Maine where Drexler summered beginning in 1962 and later became a year-round resident. The exhibition will be on view through November 21, 2020.

 

Lynne Drexler: Bathed in Color features twelve works painted by Drexler from 1968 to 1971. On view to the public for the first time, these lush colorful abstract works—elements of which recall the work of Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt—show the progression of her artistic development and maturity as an artist. Drexler was a second-generation Abstract Expressionist artist with a distinctive painting style.

 

Her vibrant paintings, executed with large, exuberant brush strokes, derive from abstract visions of both the landscape and still life. She was among the few female Abstract Expressionists during this time, and her work was often overlooked by the New York establishment. Auction prices this August indicate she's the establishment's hottest newly "discovered" artist and worthy of serious investment.

 

Recently, Drexler’s work has been in high demand after one of her paintings was featured in the home of celebrities Chrissy Teigen and John Legend in the February 2015 issue of Architectural Digest. Seen sitting in front of Lynne Drexler's. Photograph from Architectural Digest Ad, January 7, 2015.

 

 

Drexler exhibited extensively throughout her life at venues such as Tanager Gallery, Esther Robles Gallery and Westerly Gallery. In 2008 she was honored with solo shows at the Monhegan Museum and the Portland Museum of Art. Her work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Monhegan Museum, Farnsworth Museum, Brooklyn Museum and the Queens Museum, Greenville County Museum of Art and the Portland Museum of Art among others. 

 

All paintings signed and titled verso. 
Artworks are unframed and may have minor signs of age.
  • A Life In Color Lynne Drexler, YouTube
  • Inside John Legend and Chrissy Teigen’s NYC Home | Architectural Digest
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  • Lynne Drexler, Ignited Bush, 1968
    Lynne Drexler, Ignited Bush, 1968
  • Lynne Drexler, Plumed Yellow, 1968

    Lynne Drexler, Plumed Yellow, 1968

  • Lynne Drexler, Rose to Red, 1968
    Lynne Drexler, Rose to Red, 1968
  • Lynn Drexler, Embattled Blue, 1968-69

    Lynn Drexler,

    Embattled Blue, 1968-69

  • Lynne Drexler, Ignited Bush, 1968
    Lynne Drexler, Ignited Bush, 1968
  • Lynne Drexler, Stagnant Iridescence, 1969
    Lynne Drexler, Stagnant Iridescence, 1969
  • Lynne Drexler, Autumn Ground, 1969

    Lynne Drexler, Autumn Ground, 1969

  • Lynne Drexler, Tossed Wave, 1969
    Lynne Drexler, Tossed Wave, 1969
  • Lynne Drexler, Floral Abundance, 1971
    Lynne Drexler, Floral Abundance, 1971
  • Lynne Drexler, Grass Death, 1968

    Lynne Drexler, Grass Death, 1968

  • Lynne Drexler, Evensong, 1968

    Lynne Drexler, Evensong, 1968

     

  • Under the of Tutelage Robert Motherwell

    From Exhibition Catalogue: Lynne Drexler Painter, Monhegan Museum Portland Museum of Art, 2008, by Susan Danly. 

     

    Drexler’s other mentor, Robert Motherwell (1915-1991) was even more important in establishing her attitude toward art in general and its place in her intellectual development. Motherwell, a prolific art critic and painter, wrote about the innovative approach of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism “which tries to find out what art is precisely through the process of making art. That is to say, one discovers, so to speak, rather than imposes a picture. What constitutes the discovery is the discovery of one’s own feeling.”

     

    This Motherwellian emphasis on the process of personal invention impelled Drexler’s changing approach to making art from the beginning.In a series of early hand-colored etchings, we see Drexler experimenting with animated abstract shapes and vivid color—the formal elements that   would come to dominate her mature approach to painting.

     

    These early etchings owe much to the graphic art of Robert Motherwell and other avant-garde printmakers, such as Stanley William Hayter and Gabor Peterdi, who were transforming the graphic arts from an illustrative to an abstract mode of representation. Drexler greatly admired Motherwell’s work, as well as his intellect, remarking that he had “the finest mind I have ever met in the world.” She appreciated his philosophical approach and his writing about art as well. Her early ink and wash drawings, with their aggressive use of the paint stroke, are also related to the work of leading members of the New York school of Abstract Expressionists, notably Motherwell and Franz Kline. But as she began to work with color, the lessons she absorbed while studying at Hans Hofmann’s school helped to define her unique approach to painting. The earliest of these small-scale paintings rely on vivid colors and swirling, gestural shapes to animate the overall surface of the picture. 

    Courtesy of Film, 'A Life In Color' (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Collection of Monhegan Museum, Gift of the Estate of Lynne Drexler. Exhibition Catalogue, "Lynne Drexler: Painter, " Monhegan Museum & Portland Museum of Art (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Lynne Drexler, Opera, 1958, oil on canvas, 24" x 36", Courtesy of the Drexler Estate, Michael Rancourt (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

    In Class New York City, 1950's

    Courtesy of Film, 'A Life In Color'

  • Embracing Color With Hans Hoffman

    From Exhibition Catalogue: Lynne Drexler Painter, Monhegan Museum Portland Museum of Art, 2008, by Susan Danly.

     

    Then, at Colonial Williamsburg in her late twenties, Lynne Drexler met modernist architect Howard Bernstein, who she said had once worked for Le Corbusier. He and one of her teachers at William and Mary, encouraged the young artist to think about moving to New York to learn more about the contemporary art scene. Drexler was further aided in this endeavor by the artist Peter Kahn, who was teaching at nearby Hampton Institute. He suggested that she contact his brother, the painter Wolf Kahn, and Hans Hofmann, who ran the leading modernist art school in New York City.

     

    So in 1956, Lynne Drexler moved to New York and quickly immersed herself in the Abstract Expressionist movement. She received a one-year scholarship to the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts that included a stay at his summer school in Provincetown. She eventually went on to study with Robert Motherwell at Hunter College in 1958. Both Hofmann and Motherwell influenced her early work and convinced Drexler to pursue her painting on a full-time basis. Prominent figures of the New York School in the late 1950s, each of these first-generation Abstract Expressionists provided Drexler with important lessons on becoming a painter—personal and professional.

     

    Born in Germany, Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), had come to the United States in the early 1930s to teach modern art. He was an important conduit for many young American artists because of his first-hand experience with the origins of the modernist movement. During his own student days in Paris from 1903 until 1914, Hofmann had known the giants of European modernism: Picasso, Braque, and Matisse. Forced to return to Germany because of the outbreak of the first World War, Hofmann was instrumental in preserving many of painter Wassily Kandinsky’s early works. During the 1920s, he opened his own art school in Munich that had annual summer sessions in resorts all over Europe. When he came to New York in 1934, he continued a similar schedule of classes, with winter sessions in the city and summer sessions in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was from Hofmann that Drexler learned the formal principles of modernism.

     

    Hofmann believed that the origins of art, even abstract painting, derived from nature. By observing the way in which objects were situated in space, an artist gained a fuller understanding of the concepts of volume and void. His most famous tenet was the concept of “push and pull.” As he saw it, “the mystery of plastic creation is based upon the dualism of the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional” and “only from the varied counterplay of push and pull, and from its varied intensities, will plastic creation result.” Combined with his ideas about the use of color, this same formal approach to abstraction underlies all of Lynne Drexler’s art. Following Hofmann’s teachings, Drexler’s use of color determined the forms in her paintings, not vice-versa as had been taught in traditional, academic art schools. Hofmann believed that colors should be separated by intervals and that the relationship between colors should create formal tension across the surface of a canvas.



     

  • FORMAL (AND INFORMAL) EDUCATION

    New York City 1960's, The Chelsea Hotel

    From Exhibition Catalogue: Lynne Drexler Painter, Monhegan Museum Portland Museum of Art, 2008, by Susan Danly.

     

    Lynne Mapp Drexler was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1928. Drexler began her study of art as a child, painting landscapes by the tender age of eight. In the late 1950s, after attending the College of William and Mary in Virginia, she immersed herself in Abstract Expressionism, studying with Hans Hofmann in both his New York and Provincetown schools. From there she went on to graduate study at Hunter College in New York City with Robert Motherwell. 

     

    But it was her early years in New York, first as a student and then as the wife of an artist, which shaped her own art and her dealings with the art world. Both Hultberg and Drexler were from a second generation of Abstract Expressionist artists that emerged in the latter half of the 1950s. This group—which also included Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Joan Mitchell, Robert Goodnough, and Grace Hartigan, among many others—had begun to challenge the hegemony of abstraction, and gradually figurative elements began to reappear in their art, which was equally informed by the gestural brushwork and emphasis on color in earlier Abstraction Expressionism. 

     

    In 1961, Lynne Drexler’s paintings first came to the attention of several well-known artists who were members of the influential Tanager Gallery—Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, Lois Dodd, and Sally Hazelet.  The Tanager Gallery, which operated as an artist’s collective from 1952 to 1962, provided an important venue for some of these second-generation Abstract Expressionists. Drexler’s first solo exhibition, which included new, large-scale paintings (60 x 45 inches) represented her first step toward a mature and independent style. It is clear that by 1961 her distinctive patchwork of color had emerged as a principal organizing form in her abstract art. 

     

    Over the course of the following two decades, Drexler showed her work sporadically in New York at the Landmark Gallery’s annual Christmas group shows between 1974 and 1979 and in one-person shows at the Alonzo Gallery in the early 1970s.  During the early 1980s, her paintings frequently appeared in group shows at the Veydras Gallery in New York.  It was a basic tenet among the Abstract Expressionists, among whom she matured, that any dedicated artist should continue to work even without critical acclaim.

     

    For a period of three years in the mid-1960s, Drexler accompanied her husband on extended travels to the West Coast, Mexico, and Honolulu in search of new artistic opportunities. In 1963 Hultberg received a grant to work on a series of prints at the Tamarind Print Studio in Los Angeles, and Drexler also executed some experimental lithographs there. In 1965 her paintings were exhibited at the Esther Robles Gallery, one of the city’s important galleries dedicated to contemporary art, and there were a few notices of her work in the local press. The most important appeared in a 1967 article in the Los Angeles Times Home Magazine that included views of Drexler’s paintings purchased at the Robles Gallery on the walls of a newly constructed, modern-style home furnished with Sam Maloof’s contemporary furniture in the fashionable and pricey suburb of San Marino, just east of downtown Los Angeles.  

     

    Returning to New York in 1967, Drexler and Hultberg moved into the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street, long a mecca for the city’s bohemian arts community. Among its more famous, and sometimes infamous, residents were the author Thomas Wolfe, the avant-garde composer Virgil Thomson, and playwright Arthur Miller. During the 1960s, it had become a haven for rock musicians, including Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, and the Velvet Underground. Andy Warhol’s film, The Chelsea Girls, replete with drag queens and street people, was filmed there in 1966. The owner of the hotel was an art collector who frequently accepted artwork in lieu of rent. The lobby walls were filled with paintings by such well-known artists as Larry Rivers and Jackson Pollock, as well as one of Lynne Drexler’s abstract works. 

     

    But the Chelsea Hotel was hardly a residence conducive to listening to classical music and, furthermore, with an atmosphere charged with “sex, drugs, and rock’ n’ roll,” it was impossible to work there.  When Drexler developed serious problems with her eyesight (she was colorblind for a period of six months) and her career seemed stalled (especially compared to that of her husband), she grew increasingly depressed and attempted suicide.  In 1971, as a means of escape from the stresses of the city, she and Hultberg bought the Monhegan house from Martha Jackson and began to spend more time on the island. They divided their time between summers in Maine and winters in New York, as did most of the artists working on the island at the time. 

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