After her death, Monhegan artist Lynn Drexler became famous.

ROCKLAND, Maine — Lynn Drexler died in 1999 as she lived: drawing and painting, endlessly, obsessively, in the warm southern light streaming through her kitchen window on Monhegan Island, Maine. Darling A member of the island community of several dozen year-round residents, Drexler spent nearly two decades there, painting still lifes and landscapes in pursuit of her never-ending creative impulse. Those who knew her said it was a good life; Content with obscurity, she found her place in the world.

But Drexler had another life, at the epicenter of the American Art Revolution, and her works from that period, some of which were discovered in her Monhegan home after her death, catapulted her from virtual unknown to posthumous superstar. You can see impressive examples of this now in “Lynn Drexler: Notes in Color,” a small and powerful survey of the late artist’s work at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. The core of the exhibition is a half-dozen abstract paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, large and bold, with her distinctive style of cascading fields of color painted in short, blocky strokes, gently clashing with each other.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Drexler lived at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, tending bar at the Cedar Tavern with William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, the founders of Abstract Expressionism. She studied with the eminent movement teacher Hans Hofmann at his legendary art school in Provincetown and studied with one of his peers, Robert Motherwell. She showed some of her work, but not enough, despite her obvious gifts. Men dominated a growing scene characterized by crude gestural painting oozing with semi-violent machismo. Women were rarely taken so seriously. In the early 1980s, she rolled up her canvases and moved to Monhegan forever.

After her death, the task of sorting through her life’s works—thousands of pieces of art hidden in the upstairs bedrooms or basement of her white clapboard home—was left to Monhegan friends Harry Bone, a retired merchant marine, and artist couple Bill and Barbara . Manning. They started in the early 2000s. Unprecedented miracles appeared again and again. On the lawn they unfurled large abstract paintings that had been rolled up and hidden in the basement, untouched for decades.

In 2008, Farnsworth accepted six of her large abstract paintings, donated by Drexler’s friends who were looking anywhere, anywhere to preserve her work. Some of them hang here and now, inspiring examples of exceptional talent: “Sismont,” 1962, a thicket of forms reminiscent of awkward overlays of sunlight and forest, short, heavy strokes of black and green pursued by a swarm of sharp strokes of yellow; an untitled work from 1959-62 with a blooming center of broken pinks and lavenders bursting from patches of black.

These were the first museum acquisitions of Drexler’s work ever made, and they were stored in the Farnsworth vault for years. But more recently, the narrow history of American art has begun to expand as curators seek out artists mentioned in footnotes or written outside the narrative; women, often pushed aside, made their way inside.

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

Drexler suddenly became an important piece of the expanding puzzle as a second-generation female abstract expressionist. Sensing the moment, Farnsworth has decided to auction two of its Drexlers in 2021.

They expected to raise $40,000–$60,000 each. “Our thought was that we could (use the proceeds) take care of the remaining artwork and hang it on the wall,” said Chris Brownwell, Farnsworth’s principal. “And if we’re really lucky and hit the top end of that $60,000, we can use it to acquire more Drexlers and really tell the whole story of her career.” To their amazement, the first sold for $1.2 million, the second for $1.5 million.. “The hammer price dropped and we thought, ‘Wow, now we have something,’” Brownwell said.

On the walls of the permanent collection galleries surrounding the Farnsworth Drexler exhibition, small green and black labels tell you what Farnsworth decided to do with the windfall. “Lynn Drexler Acquisition Fund,” reads the labels and is placed next to recently acquired works such as Elise Ansel’s Cornbury II, 2023, a vibrant abstraction of Old Masters, and Carly Gloviski’s Canning the Sunset, 2021. the shelf is full. with jars of colored sand in gradient shades reminiscent of radiant twilight.

Non-acquisitions—institutions selling works from their collection—can be challenging and sometimes frowned upon, but it’s hard to argue with the beneficial nature of Farnsworth’s initiative. The Drexler Foundation allows the museum to acquire works by living Maine artists, helping them escape the obscurity in which Drexler labored. women artists, indigenous artists, and artists of color have all been historically marginalized in the American art canon. “The goal is to prevent Lynn Drexler from repeating herself,” Brownwell said. “We want to celebrate and support artists when they need it most—during their actual careers.”

At Monhegan, Drexler seemed to leave her time as an abstract painter a distant memory. At first glance, she might have joined the community of artists who came to Monhegan in late spring and opened their studios to summer tourists, drawn by the island’s reputation as a haven for painters of cheerful seascapes and lighthouses. But she was not like them, and in something that many never knew; her signature color blocks and vibrant brushwork were clear, even when she was painting clothes on the washing line.

She sold what she could of the landscapes and still lifes she took on the island, but was just as likely to give them away for birthdays or other special occasions to her friends and neighbors. “Almost everyone in Monhegan has a Drexler,” DeSimone said with a laugh.

Drexler sometimes opened her home to the curious, although they were more likely to find her working at the kitchen table rather than eagerly putting items up for sale. “She wasn’t a big advocate for herself,” said Jane Bianco, Farnsworth’s curator who organized Color Notes. “She even called herself a hermit, which was a bit of an exaggeration because she was quite an influential social force on the island. But she was also very practical: “How much should I pay for firewood for the winter?” Something like that.

However, if they ventured up or down the stairs in her large white clapboard house, they might stumble upon another world, a larger world that she had left many years ago. Drexler, who had been in poor health in recent years, could no longer climb stairs, Bianco said, “but if you were willing to go upstairs on your own and pull things out and put them on the bed, you could find the most wonderful things. “

However, most of it remained untouched until her death. Why Drexler kept them secret we can only guess. Was it fame she never achieved? May be. She was married to an artist. John Hultbergwho during his lifetime received some recognition among the AbEx cohort that has since disappeared. The marriage was stormy; Hultberg was an alcoholic, and a vacation to Monhegan in the 1980s, where they summered together for years, was a last-ditch effort to salvage the relationship. He became the sole Drexler when Hultberg returned to New York after a short stay, marking the end of the marriage.

On Monhegan, Drexler found community and peace. She devoted her painterly look to the meadow fields and rocky shores, and the harsh North Atlantic breeze that blew the laundry lying on her line in stormy waves of color and light. Vibrating with waves of bright colors and joyful strokes of thick paint that lay heavily across the canvas, her later works convey her love for this land.

In 2008, based on a discovery made just a few years earlier, Monhegan Museum held a retrospective Drexler estatesand managed to place it in the Portland Art Museum. After the exhibition, Farnsworth took six paintings and Portland one, but the exhibition was both ahead of and a victim of its time. It opened at the height of the economic crisis, when the art market was almost completely captured and museums had not yet begun the work of rebalancing their huge gender gap.

As satisfying as it was to uncover Drexler’s full story, it was also disappointing. “Once we saw all the things she did that people didn’t know about, we really wanted to tell her story,” said Jennifer Pye, the museum’s director and chief curator. “This was before things got really exciting,” she said with a laugh.

Why now and not then? This question is not easy to answer. What is clear, however, is that it makes Drexler’s legacy even greater. Her work has become a lasting legacy for generations of Maine artists, a gift of encouragement and respect she never had. How would a reclusive artist feel about this? Pie doesn’t hesitate. “She would be having enjoyed“

LYNN DREKSLER: COLOR NOTES

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

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Murray White can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him @TheMurrayWhyte.