The painter Lynne Drexler (1928-1999) was a southerner by birth (Newport News, Virginia) and upbringing, but by the end of her life she belonged, as it were, to Monhegan Island. In the early 1960s she began to spend part of her summers there. She became a year-round islander in 1983.
This exhibition, organized by Tralice Bracey, Monhegan Museum curator, and Susan Danley, curator of graphics, photograph and contemporary art at the Portland Museum of Art, provides perhaps the fullest accounting yet of Drexler’s life and art, from early abstractions that reflect her studies with painters Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, to the remarkable still lifes of her later years. In between are several classic Gustav Klimt-like mosaic pieces; a number of color pencil studies of interiors and island views; and a striking silk cotton patchwork dress.
The large “Untitled” from 1962 displays the painter’s signature style: clustered brushstrokes in a variety of sizes covering the canvas. Drexler was a colorist from early on, fearless in her use of primaries to heighten optical energy. As one reviewer put it in the 1960s, “A first impression of Lynne Drexler’s paintings is certain to arouse the retinas of all but the blind.”
The exhibition brings to light intriguing aspects of the artist’s development of her subject matter. For example, she often used black-and-white photographs as source material. They functioned, writes Danley in the exhibition catalogue, “more as visual note-taking than as sources for detailed transcriptions.” An example is “Laundered Wind,” 1980, a lovely rendering of billowing sheets drying on a porch clothesline that can be linked to a photo of the same subject.
Drexler also found inspiration in classical music and opera. Like Marion Olin (1919-2006), another painter of her generation with Maine island connections, Drexler was able to transcribe music into corresponding visual equivalents. The large “Thematic Repeat,” 1976, has distinct overtones of a musical composition.
The exhibition was the occasion for the making of the video portrait “Lynne Drexler: A Life in Color.” Built around an interview with the artist recorded at her Monhegan home toward the end of her life, the film, produced by Roger Amory, offers interviews with the show’s two curators, as well as with friends and fellow painters, including Lois Dodd, Frances Kornbluth and Bill Manning. It is as loving, thoughtful and engaging a portrait of an artist as one is likely to view.
Ed Deci, director of the Monhegan Museum, recently noted that the aesthetics of artists who have painted on the island are so varied that the summer exhibition can offer something different every year, from realism to abstraction, with many variants in between. The museum, which recently launched a capital campaign to restore several of the older sections of its impressive Lighthouse Hill compound, is making the most of its collection. The Drexler exhibition represents another example of interpretation and enhancement of the first order.
[“Lynne Drexler: Painter” runs through Sept. 30. The show travels to the Portland Museum of Art where it will be on display Dec. 6, 2008-March 1, 2009. To view color images and a photographic portrait of the artist, visit http://www.islandinstitute.org/.]
Carl Little is a contributing author to the forthcoming book Painting My Life: The Art of Dorothy Eisner.