After her death, Monhegan artist Lynne Drexler rises to stardom

ROCKLAND, Maine – Lynne Drexler died in 1999 as she had lived: painting and drawing, ceaselessly, compulsively, under the warm southern light streaming through her kitchen window on Maine’s Monhegan Island. a loved one A member of the island’s community of several dozen permanent residents, Drexler had spent nearly two decades there, painting still lifes and landscapes, alone with her inexhaustible creative drive. It was a good life, said those who knew her; Content in the darkness, she had found her place in the world.

But Drexler had led another life, at ground zero of an American artistic revolution, and her work from that period, some discovered in her Monhegan home after her death, has catapulted her from virtual unknown to posthumous superstar. You can see spectacular examples of this now in “Lynne Drexler: Color Notes,” a powerful little study of the late painter’s work at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. The foundation of the exhibition is a half-dozen abstract canvases from the 1950s and 1960s, big and bold, with their distinctive style of cascading fields of color painted in short, blocky strokes, gently colliding with each other.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Drexler had lived in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, shining in the Cedar Tavern bar alongside Williem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, founding members of Abstract Expressionism. He had learned from the movement’s eminent master, Hans Hofmann, at his legendary Provincetown art school, and had studied with one of his colleagues, Robert Motherwell. He showed some of his work, but not enough, despite his obvious gifts. Men dominated the burgeoning scene, characterized by crude, gestural painting that exuded semi-violent machismo. Women were rarely taken so seriously. In the early 1980s, he rolled up his canvases and moved permanently to Monhegan.

After his death, the task of sorting through his life’s work—thousands of pieces hidden in the upstairs bedrooms or basement of his white clapboard house—was left to Monhegan’s friends, Harry Bone, a merchant mariner. retired, and the artist couple Bill and Barbara. Manning. They started in the early 2000s. Unseen wonders came to light again and again. Outside on the lawn, they unfurled large abstract canvases that had been rolled up and hidden in the basement, untouched for decades.

The Farnsworths accepted six of their large abstract paintings in 2008, gifted by friends of Drexler who were looking for a place, anywhere, to preserve their work. Several hang here now, stimulating examples of a singular talent: “Cismont,” 1962, a tangle of forms evoking superpositions of sun and forest, short, heavy strokes of black and green chased by a swarm of sharp strokes of yellow; an untitled work from 1959-62, with a blooming center of fractured roses and lavenders bursting from flecks of black.

They were the first museum acquisitions of Drexler’s work ever made and remained in Farnsworth’s storage for years. But more recently, the narrow history of American art began to expand as curators sought out artists footnoted or excluded from the narrative; women, often marginalized, were entering.

“I think all museums were recognizing the gaps in the collection and thinking about women artists, artists of color and underrecognized Indigenous artists,” said Farnsworth chief curator Jaime DeSimone.

Drexler had suddenly become an important piece of an expanding puzzle as a second-generation abstract expressionist. Sensing the moment, Farnsworth decided in 2021 to sell two of his Drexlers at auction.

They hoped to raise between $40,000 and $60,000 each. “Our idea was that we can (use the profits to) take care of the remaining works and we can put them on the wall,” said Chris Brownawell, director of Farnsworth. “And if we’re really lucky and hit the upper limit of that $60,000, we can use it to acquire more Drexlers and really tell the whole story of his career.” To your amazement, the first sold for $1.2 million and the second for $1.5 million.. “The hammer price went down and we thought, ‘Wow, now we have something,’” Brownawell said.

On the walls of the permanent collection galleries surrounding Farnsworth’s Drexler exhibition, Little green and black labels announce what the Farnsworths decided to do with the windfall. “Lynne Drexler Acquisition Fund,” the labels say, placed next to recently acquired works such as Elise Ansel’s “Cornbury II,” 2023, a vibrant abstraction of an Old Master work, and Carly Glovinsky’s “Canning the Sunset,” 2021 , a full shelf. with jars of colored sand in gradient tones reminiscent of the radiant sunset.

Disacquisition (institutions selling works from their collection) can be complicated and sometimes frowned upon, but it is difficult to argue with the salutary nature of Farnsworth’s initiative. The fund in Drexler’s name allows the museum to acquire works by living Maine artists, helping them evade the obscurity in which Drexler toiled. He has helped the museum build its holdings in women artists, indigenous artists, and artists of color, all historically marginalized in the American art canon. “The goal is to not have another Lynne Drexler story,” Brownawell said. “We want to celebrate and support artists when they need it most: during their real careers.”

In Monhegan, Drexler seemed to have relegated her time as an abstract painter to a distant memory. From the outside, he might have blended in with the community of artists who came to Monhegan in late spring, opening his studios to summer tourists drawn by the island’s reputation as a haven for painters of cheerful seascapes and lighthouses. But she wasn’t like them, and in ways most never knew; his signature blocks of color and lush brushwork were distinctive, even when he was painting clothes on a clothesline.

He sold what he could of the landscapes and still lifes he made on the island, but he was also likely to give pieces away, either for birthdays or other special occasions, to his friends and neighbors. “Almost everyone in Monhegan has a Drexler,” DeSimone said with a laugh.

Drexler opened her home to curious onlookers at times, although they were more likely to find her working at her kitchen table than eagerly offering pieces for sale. “She wasn’t a big advocate for herself,” said Jane Bianco, the Farnsworth curator who organized “Color Notes.” “She even called herself a hermit, which was a bit of an exaggeration, because she was quite a social force on the island. But she was also very practical: “How much do I have to pay for firewood for the winter?” That kind of thing.”

However, if they ventured up or down the stairs of her large white clapboard house, they might stumble upon another world, a larger world, that she had abandoned years before. Drexler, who suffered from health problems in his later years, could no longer climb the stairs, Bianco said, “but if you were willing to climb the stairs on your own, take things out and put them on the bed, you could find the most notable things.” . .”

However, most of it remained intact until his death. Why Drexler kept them hidden, we can only guess. Was it the renown he never really achieved? Maybe. She had been married to an artist, John Hultbergwho gained some recognition among the AbEx cohort during his lifetime who It has since faded away. The marriage was tumultuous; Hultberg was an alcoholic and the retreat to Monhegan in the ’80s, where they had summered together for years, was a last attempt to save the relationship. It became the sole property of Drexler when Hultberg returned to New York after a brief stay, marking the end of the marriage.

In Monhegan, Drexler found community and peace. He devoted his painterly gaze to its meadows and rugged coastlines, and to the strong North Atlantic breezes that stirred the clothes hanging on the line outside in tumultuous waves of color and light. The later works, vibrating with waves of bright color and joyful brushstrokes of thick paint trailing heavily across the canvas, capture his love of that land.

In 2008, building on his discovery a few years earlier, the monhegan museum held a retrospective of the Drexler propertyand also managed to place it in the Portland Art Museum. After the exhibition, Farnsworth took six paintings and Portland took one, but the exhibition was both ahead of its time and a victim of it. It opened its doors at the height of the economic crisis, with the art market practically seized and museums not yet taking on the job of rebalancing their marked gender gap.

As gratifying as it was to bring Drexler’s full story to light, it was also disappointing. “Once we saw everything he had done that people didn’t know about, we really wanted to get his story out there,” said Jennifer Pye, the museum’s director and chief curator. “That was before things got really exciting,” he said, laughing.

Why now and not then? That is a question that is not easy to answer. What is clear, however, is that Drexler’s legacy is even greater for it. Her work has established a permanent legacy for generations of Maine artists, a gift of support and respect she never had. How would the solitary painter feel about it? Pye doesn’t hesitate. “She would be glad.”

LYNNE DREXLER: COLOR NOTES

Until January 12. Farnsworth Museum of Art, 16 Museum St., Rockland, Maine. 207-596-6457, www.farnsworthmuseum.org

Murray Whyte can be contacted at [email protected]. follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.