Lynne Mapp Drexler

Lynne Mapp Drexler (1928-1999) was a New York and Maine artist associated with the second generation of American Abstract Expressionist artists who emerged in the 1950s, a group that numbered Larry Rivers, Robert Rauschenberg, Joan Mitchell, Jasper Johns, Robert Goodnough, and Grace Hartigan. In recent years, Drexler has been drawing renewed and long-overdue interest for her post-abstract modernist works, and her reputation has undergone a significant reassessment that has placed her firmly within the front rank of her generation.

Trained by the iconic colorist Hans Hofmann and his teachings that color determined composition, as well as by Robert Motherwell, who greatly influenced her work, Drexler produced luminous, deeply personal canvases that combine the ambitions of postwar American abstraction with her own distinctive sensibility. Hofmann's celebrated "push-pull" theory, which insisted that color relationships alone could produce spatial depth on a flat surface, was central to Drexler's development and remained a foundational principle of her practice throughout her career. Inspired equally by classical music and opera, Drexler painted with a flatness in her backgrounds reminiscent of her needlework and embroidery, giving her surfaces a woven, mosaic-like quality that distinguishes her work from that of her contemporaries. Later in her life, after her marriage and her move to the remote Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine, Drexler had the opportunity to work and sketch out of doors. Her summer sketches were reimagined during the long winter months into colorful and luxurious abstracted landscapes, and her affinity for nature became intimately intertwined with her work. These paintings focus exclusively on color and composition, producing a unique abstraction that sets her apart from her contemporaries.

Drexler was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1928 and 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 at 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. In her early works Drexler focused on color and composition, eventually reconciling her two great interests, landscape and abstraction, in her late work of the 1980s and 1990s. But it was in the 1950s that she set her foundation, a synthesis of Post-Impressionist landscape painting and postwar painterly abstraction. The results are something not familiar to most students of the period, and her crisp, colorful brushwork allows the artist to sing with a completely original voice.

Classical music remained an important part of Drexler's art throughout her life. When she lived in New York she regularly attended concerts at Carnegie Hall, where she would make sketches while she was in the audience, translating the structure and mood of the music directly into her working notebooks. Her vibrant surfaces are both complex and painterly, but with a flatness akin to something found in the background of a Gustav Klimt work. This unusual pictorial vocabulary of jewel-like color dabs, mosaic-like patterning, and quietly structured composition anticipates aspects of the contemporary interest in the meeting of abstraction and decoration.

Drexler lived the last sixteen years of her life on Monhegan Island with her husband, the painter John Hultberg, joining a small community of artists that has attracted major American painters since Robert Henri and Edward Hopper worked there in the early twentieth century. She passed away in 1999. Drexler exhibited extensively throughout her life at venues such as Tanager Gallery, Esther Robles Gallery, and Westerly Gallery. She has been the subject of major recent exhibitions at the Monhegan Museum and the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, and her work has entered the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Monhegan Museum, the Farnsworth Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Queens Museum, among others. Her rediscovery has been one of the most significant developments in the recent reassessment of postwar American art, restoring to view an artist whose singular fusion of nature, music, and color has finally been given the recognition it deserves.