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.
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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.
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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.
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FORMAL (AND INFORMAL) EDUCATION
New York City 1960's, The Chelsea Hotel
