Drexler’s works of that period are conjured via the overall patterning typical of Colour Field painters of her generation, often in dense passages of primary or complementary colour. In Titan/Titian Remembered (1975), repeated rectilinear and curvilinear forms cascade down the picture plane in a densely layered patchwork of yellow and mustard. The painting hovers somewhere between landscape, still life and abstraction – Drexler’s shapes recalling blades of grass, flower heads, fields seen from above, and dappled sunlight streaming through trees, even as they refuse to coalesce definitively into any of these subjects, scales, or viewpoints. Yet her increasingly abstract focus on shape, colour and formal relationality functioned less as a rejection of figuration per se than as a desire to capture, in paint or crayon, an encounter with the world as vibrating energy, rendering visuality as sensation and metamorphosis.

If her careful deployment of complementary shades invoked the Venetian colourist Titian, then also discernible in her canvases of the 1970s are the energetic swirls of Van Gogh or the dense patterning of Gustav Klimt. These painterly influences are clear in works such as Foam (1971), in which passages of gold and orange punctuate undulating areas of green and aqua, such that the energy of one activates the other, and forms merge into overall energy fields. Titles such as Sunshine Divine (1970) and Enraged Ocean (1971) further point to the potential for natural phenomena to be experienced in emotional or transcendental terms, landscape as aura as much as material form.

Looking back on Drexler’s practice in 1988, the critic Eunice Agar emphasised the affective nature of Drexler’s project of picturing, writing that ‘it was difficult to sustain the feeling of a place.’³ Although her point was a biographical one – pointing to the artist’s dual existence between New York City and Maine – it also suggested the conceptual and temporal complexity of her paintings. To sustain a feeling of place was to hold, at once, the sensation of encountering it, being in it, and recalling it from afar, bringing together the act of seeing with the act of conjuring in the mind’s eye. The piles of striated forms in paintings such as Stringed Order (1977) and Massed Infinity (1978) suggest geological strata interspersed with veins of coarse crystalline matter. In such works, it is possible to discern echoes of the coastal setting of Drexler’s beloved Monhegan Island off the coast of Maine, where she and her husband, John Hultberg, bought a summer house in 1971, while continuing to live in Manhattan, or of California, where they had resided briefly in the early 1960s. But such memories emerge as structural in Drexler’s paintings, too. In its title and in the repeated marks, blocks and shapes that cover its surface, Titan/Titian Remembered invokes the reiterative nature of memory in which episodes come into focus and develop form via conceptual and affective return and revision. In this regard, Drexler’s approach draws from that of her teacher, the painter Hans Hofmann, whose famous ‘push-pull’ dictum described an approach in which blocks of colour are set in relation such that they appear to emerge from and recede into the picture plane.⁴ In Drexler’s hands, this spatial compositional play combined with a temporal one to invoke the reiterative stop-start of recollection.

For Drexler, the role of memory was more than merely an aesthetic exercise: towards the very end of the previous decade, the painter had experienced a sudden and acute episode of temporary colour blindness, likely brought on by traumatic events in her marriage. Unable to paint, she remained tethered to her art practice through her crayons, since, she explained, ‘I could remember the color of the crayon.’⁵ This tension – between knowing colour, feeling it and recalling it – continued to animate Drexler’s work, even as she regained her ability to distinguish colour. Thus, in the works described above, the appearance of light passing through trees might also be the feeling of light felt through closed eyelids, in which colour is experienced as light or heat and may originate in light that is present, or merely remembered.

Even as she sought to conjure the memory of place and to grapple with the representational weight of landscape as a category both external and internal, Drexler turned in the 1970s to another art form – classical music – as a means to explore modes of perception. She took her sketchpad to regular matinee performances at the Metropolitan Opera, struck particularly by the Met’s 1974–75 season of Wagner’s Ring cycle, and created works in response to the capacity of music to conjure non-visually a sense of texture, form and sensation. Inspired by Wassily Kandinsky’s understanding of abstraction as functioning akin to musical notation, the resulting paintings might be read also as conveying the pitch, timbre, pace and energy of music, even as they once again grappled with how to capture and sustain those fleeting experiences. In Trebled / Tregled Blue (1974) and Blue Vanity (1974), distinct sections of closely striated forms float against dark monochromatic grounds, suggesting bursts of sound against silence or musical movements that return to similar, repeated motifs. Stringed Order (1977) and Twilight Variation (1977) combine distinct types of mark and colour in a manner that recalls the different timbres or tones of orchestral families, where dark rhythmic reiterations are punctuated by bright bursts.

That a painting might invoke both music and stone, both geological rootedness and flights of imagination, speaks to the heart of Drexler’s painterly investigations.

Lynne Drexler (1928–99) was born in Newport News, Virginia, and lived and worked in New York City and Monhegan Island, Maine. Her solo exhibitions include White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London (2024); Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine (2024); Berry Campbell, New York (2022); Mnuchin Gallery, New York (2022); Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York (2022, 2007, 2002, 1987 and 1986); Monhegan Historical and Cultural Museum and Portland Museum of Art, Maine (2008); Jameson Modern, Portland, Maine (2007); Greenhut Gallery, Portland, Maine (2005); Lupine Gallery, Monhegan Island, Maine (2003 and 1998); Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine (2003); Gallery 6, Portland, Maine (1994 and 1989); Judith Leighton Gallery, Blue Hill, Maine (1989); Gallery 127, Portland, Maine (1989); Middlesex College Community College, Piscataway, New Jersey (1984); St. John’s University, New York (1984); Aldona Gobuzas Gallery, New York (1983); Veydras Limited, New York (1983); Alonzo Gallery, New York (1975, 1973 and 1971); Nuuanu Valley Gallery, Honolulu, Hawaii (1967); Esther Robles Gallery, Los Angeles (1965); and Tanager Gallery, New York (1961).

Drexler’s work is held in public collections across the US, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Bates College, Lewiston, Maine; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York; Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; Monhegan Museum, Maine; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Prentice Hall Collection, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Massachusetts; Queens Museum, New York; Tamarind Print Collection, Los Angeles; and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

In autumn 2026, a travelling retrospective of Drexler’s work will commence at the Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williamsburg, Virginia – a university museum affiliated with The College of William & Mary, where the artist took night classes before moving to New York to study under Hans Hofmann.

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¹ New York Magazine, 28 April 1975, p.34; New York Magazine, 29 November 1971, p.26.
² Marion Lerner Levine, ‘How Real is Realist Painting?’, Women Artists Newsletter, vol.2, no.3, Summer 1976, p.1.
³ Eunice Agar, ‘Lynne Drexler’, American Artist, vol.52, May 1988, p.44.
⁴ Hans Hofmann, ‘The Search for the Real in the Visual Arts’ (1948), in Sara T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes (eds.), Search for the Real and Other Essays, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967, pp.40–48. See also Lucinda Barnes (ed.), Hans Hofmann: The Nature of Abstraction, University of California Press, 2019.
⁵ Lynne Drexler, interviewed September 1998 by Beth Van Houten and Tralice Peck Bracy, curators at the Monhegan Museum, Maine. Cited in Gail Levin, ‘Lynne Drexler’, Lynne Drexler: The First Decade, exh. cat., Mnuchin Gallery and Berry Campbell, New York, 2022, p.17.