?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 60,000 - $ 90,000
LYNNE DREXLER Christmas Stalks.
Oil on canvas, 1965. 495x375 mm; 19½x15 inches. Signed, titled and dated in oil, verso.
Provenance: Esther Robles Gallery, Los Angeles, with the label; by descent to the current owner, private collection, California.
According to the artist's site, "Drexler [1928-1999] was educated at the Richmond Professional Institute and the College of William and Mary. She studied painting with Hans Hofmann in New York and Provincetown, and with Robert Motherwell at Hunter College Graduate School. In the 1950s after several years as a writer, Drexler embarked on a long and prolific career as a painter. 'I could not stop painting, once I got started,' she said. Drexler lived for many years in New York City, where she painted and cultivated her love of the performing arts. She lived for a time in the Chelsea Hotel in its Bohemian heyday. She and her husband, the painter John Hultberg, bought a house on Monhegan Island in 1963, where they spent summers until moving to the island permanently in 1983.
She served as lay leader of the Mohegan Community Church and had a wide circle of friends among both the winter and summer communities. She was a voracious reader, and her knowledge covered a wide range of interests, from history to opera to horses. She rarely missed a broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera or the Kentucky Derby. H er work was exhibited in galleries in Maine, New York, Los Angeles and Honolulu, and is in the permanent collection of several museums, including the Portland Museum of Art, the Monhegan Museum, both in Maine, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina."
Drexler's style of painting during the 1960s and 1970s, working in a pronounced Abstract Expressionist vein, was significantly influenced by Hofmann, who taught her to create vibrant paintings using a free brush stroke, and exhibited parallels to the color palette used by Henri Matisse, notably bold blue, red, orange and yellow hues. In 1983, Drexler separated from Hultberg and moved full-time to Monhegan Island, after which her work underwent a transformation, shifting towards a more representational style with elements of the island's surroundings, including the coastal landscape and flora of the region, as well as objects and everyday scenes she encountered. Drexler's estate is currently represented by White Cube, London, and Berry Campbell, New York.
