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Lot Essay
With its dappled purple, blue, gold and maroon brushstrokes shimmering in a symphony of light and colour, Lake Woods (1960) is an exquisite early abstract painting by Lynne Drexler. It was acquired directly from the artist by the present owner and has been held in the same private collection for the past four decades. A member of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists in 1960s New York, Drexler spent the latter decades of her life painting in relative obscurity on Monhegan, a small island off the coast of Maine. Recent years have seen a renewed surge of interest in her work. Lake Woods was painted at the dawn of Drexler’s mature practice—she would hold her first solo exhibition at the Tanager Gallery in New York the following year—and exemplifies her luminous, mosaic-like abstract style. Later, she would shift towards figuration, drawing on the forests, flowers, sea and sky of her coastal surroundings. As Lake Woods’ title implies, however, a dialogue with nature was part of her paintings from the beginning. Drexler’s signature swatches of colour create a cascading interplay of depths and temperatures, evoking warm sunlight, glinting water and the cool shade of lakeside trees.
Drexler was born in Virginia in 1928 and began painting as a child. After graduating from the Richmond School of Art she moved to New York, studying at Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Arts and his summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1956, then under Robert Motherwell at Hunter College. Both older Abstract Expressionists had a formative impact on her practice. Hofmann’s method of ‘push and pull’, in particular—the creation of pictorial space through expanding, contracting and jostling planes of colour—echoes in Lake Woods, whose complementary hues and dark and light passages interact in a radiant, energetic surface. As her distinctive approach took shape, Drexler became part of the vibrant Greenwich Village art scene, frequenting the Cedar Tavern alongside painters such as Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and attending the salon-style gatherings of artists, critics and philosophers that took place at the 8th Street Club. A review of her 1961 show at the Tanager Gallery described ‘pastoral, florid, bleeding-edge canvases that are built up with swatches of tones that seem like so many Technicolor galaxies’ (V.P., ‘Lynne Drexler’, Artnews 59, February 1961, p. 19).
It was at The Club that Drexler met the California-born painter John Hultberg. They married in 1962 and spent their first summer on Monhegan, where Hultberg’s then-gallerist Martha Jackson had helped him to buy a house. The two travelled the United States and Mexico before returning to New York in 1967, living for several years in the Chelsea Hotel. They began spending more time on Monhegan over the next decade and moved there permanently in 1983. Drexler remained after they separated soon afterwards. Detached from the art world and no longer overshadowed by her husband, she continued to paint prolifically, moving towards representation as she observed the cycles and seasons of nature. Classical music was another abiding inspiration: she listened every Saturday to broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she had made sketches of performances in the late 1960s. Drexler was always confident, friends say, that her work would one day receive its due, and the past decade’s wave of critical appreciation has proved her resoundingly right. Her paintings’ lush colours have been compared to those of Fauvism and Impressionism, and the scintillating Symbolism of Gustav Klimt. Their shift between abstract and figurative modes, charged with the light and life of landscape, recalls the work of Joan Mitchell. Drexler’s voice, however, captured at its inception in Lake Woods, remains entirely and unmistakably her own.
Drexler was born in Virginia in 1928 and began painting as a child. After graduating from the Richmond School of Art she moved to New York, studying at Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Arts and his summer school in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1956, then under Robert Motherwell at Hunter College. Both older Abstract Expressionists had a formative impact on her practice. Hofmann’s method of ‘push and pull’, in particular—the creation of pictorial space through expanding, contracting and jostling planes of colour—echoes in Lake Woods, whose complementary hues and dark and light passages interact in a radiant, energetic surface. As her distinctive approach took shape, Drexler became part of the vibrant Greenwich Village art scene, frequenting the Cedar Tavern alongside painters such as Philip Guston, Grace Hartigan, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and attending the salon-style gatherings of artists, critics and philosophers that took place at the 8th Street Club. A review of her 1961 show at the Tanager Gallery described ‘pastoral, florid, bleeding-edge canvases that are built up with swatches of tones that seem like so many Technicolor galaxies’ (V.P., ‘Lynne Drexler’, Artnews 59, February 1961, p. 19).
It was at The Club that Drexler met the California-born painter John Hultberg. They married in 1962 and spent their first summer on Monhegan, where Hultberg’s then-gallerist Martha Jackson had helped him to buy a house. The two travelled the United States and Mexico before returning to New York in 1967, living for several years in the Chelsea Hotel. They began spending more time on Monhegan over the next decade and moved there permanently in 1983. Drexler remained after they separated soon afterwards. Detached from the art world and no longer overshadowed by her husband, she continued to paint prolifically, moving towards representation as she observed the cycles and seasons of nature. Classical music was another abiding inspiration: she listened every Saturday to broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where she had made sketches of performances in the late 1960s. Drexler was always confident, friends say, that her work would one day receive its due, and the past decade’s wave of critical appreciation has proved her resoundingly right. Her paintings’ lush colours have been compared to those of Fauvism and Impressionism, and the scintillating Symbolism of Gustav Klimt. Their shift between abstract and figurative modes, charged with the light and life of landscape, recalls the work of Joan Mitchell. Drexler’s voice, however, captured at its inception in Lake Woods, remains entirely and unmistakably her own.