White Cube brings Lynne Drexler's archive to Hong Kong

While the spotlight this month may be on the big art fairs in town, Hong Kong’s top galleries are launching their own must-see shows. Jaz Kong reports on the solo exhibition of Lynne Drexler at White Cube Hong Kong

Lynne Drexler at White Cube, March 26–May 17 

Over the past year, White Cube Hong Kong has brought us a variety of solo exhibitions by female artists of different ages and eras, only making us more eager to find out what the gallery will show during this much-anticipated Art Month. The answer, which may come as a surprise to some, is The Seventies, a solo presentation of the works of Lynne Drexler. The late American female artist, who died in 1999, remained unknown to most of the world until fairly recently, when one of her larger works was auctioned off at almost 20 times the higher estimate in 2022. Then, in March 2023, White Cube announced its representation of The Lynne Drexler Archive. So, who is she? And how did a student of Hans Hofmann go largely unnoticed while she was alive? 

To this day, we’re still talking about gender pay gaps, inequality and stereotyped gender roles. Imagine going back in time to 1970s US. ARTnews published an essay by American art historian Linda Nochlin in 1971 titled “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” After studying the sociopolitical status of men and women at that time, and comparing essays around this topic since 1858, Nochlin concluded, “We have suggested that it was indeed institutionally made impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent, or genius... And while great achievement is rare and difficult at best, it is still rarer and more difficult if, while you work, you must at the same time wrestle with inner demons of self-doubt and guilt and outer monsters of ridicule or patronising encouragement, neither of which have any specific connection with the quality of the art work as such.” 

Before diving into Drexler’s colourful world,let’s take a quick look at her background. Born in 1928 near Newport News, Virginia, she studied at the College of William & Mary before moving to New York in the mid-1950s. Drexler was regarded as second-generation Abstract Expressionist, having studied under Hofmann and Robert Motherwell. However, she developed her own distinctive style with an obvious influence from Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Pointillism. Despite this, she was overshadowed by her husband, John Hultberg, who was also a painter with comparable success and fame. After travelling the world with Hultberg, she chose to stay in New York and would often shuttle back and forth to their holiday home off the coast of Maine – which is also where she spent time alone, away from Hultberg. There, she painted tirelessly while listening to opera on the radio. She remained as curious as when she was a kid – reading and learning all about ballet, Russian history, horse racing and more. 

It’s said that Drexler’s works before 1959 are rarely seen – the artist apparently destroyed them as she found her own voice. Before developing her signature swatch-like brushstrokes in dense clusters with the use of geometric forms, she was heavily influenced by Hofmann. “She has incorporated Hofmann’s ‘push and pull’ theory in creating dynamic tensions within the chromatic juxtapositions and gestural brushwork of her paintings,” says Sukanya Rajaratnam, White Cube’s global director of Strategic Market Initiatives. “Her uniqueness was to create mosaic-like abstractions which were entirely unique to her practice. They seemed to bridge Post- Impressionist influences of Gustav Klimt and Georges Seurat with the non-hierarchical all-over compositions of Abstract Expressionism.” 

It was in fact Motherwell, whom she shadowed at Hunter College, that encouraged her to become an artist. However, even though she was part of the Cedar Tavern artsy gang in Greenwich Village, where Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and other Ab-X artists frequented, the so-called dynamic art scene was predominantly a “boys club”. Drexler started to exhibit towards the late 1950s and met Hultberg, who was 
already an established artist, in the early 1960s as her career was just starting to take off. However, it wasn’t a tale of happily ever after. 

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“Although her paintings look and feel optimistic, this was a difficult time in her marriage on account of John’s chronic drinking and philandering, resulting in her suffering a breakdown in 1970,” says Rajaratnam. “Lynne was hospitalised for a period and suffered from psychosomatic colour-blindness. She recuperated by taking in matinee performances at the Metropolitan Opera, where she would draw in her sketchpads
while listening to operas that she loved, including The Ring Cycle by Richard Wagner. She admired Wassily Kandinsky and his dictum of visual abstraction being akin to notes in music, and the paintings she created in the ’70s were the closest she got to being non-representational in her work.” 

The Seventies is the first presentation of Drexler in Asia, and follows The Sixties show in London that ended two months ago, which was the first major presentation of her works in Europe. “Lynne’s works from the ’60s allude to the natural world, whereas her works from the ’70s take music as their inspiration,” Rajaratnam explains. Artnet describes her style as having “precise yet expressionist brushstrokes, a bright palette and acute focus on composition, Drexler’s work calls to mind the paintings of Henri Matisse”. While that might be true for her creation in the ’60s, with much more angular geometry and boldly contrasting colours, her works “flow” much better in the ’70s with skinnier brushstrokes that allow for breathing room within her oils. 

However, as Rajaratnam emphasises, “While it would have been lovelier for her to have found success during her lifetime, I do not think of her story as a sad one. Lynne was a brave and pioneering woman who followed her passions until the end, overcoming personal hardships and unshackling herself from the people that stood in her way. It took a while, but as Frank Sinatra would say, she did it her way.” Towards the last two decades of her life when she lived separately from Hultberg, Drexler painted and enjoyed her community. Her works became more representational – of the coast, the landscape, the garden, the nature around her. In those later days, she also became more well known among galleries in Maine and New York, and her works have been collected by institutions such as Farnsworth Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago and many more. 

In and outside of the art world, we can all learn something from Drexler’s story. “Aside from the inherent social injustice of discriminating against any minority, leaving legitimate voices out of the creative dialogue makes for a far less interesting world,” Rajaratnam says. It’s also as important to add back her-stories into histories. “I believe that quality must be the arbiter of these decisions. Having established this as the baseline, I think that bringing women forward balances the scales after decades of gender bias and creates a truer – and richer – narrative for art history.” 

For anyone who’s visiting the show later this month, Rajaratnam has listed out some key points to pay attention to: “The first is the timelessness of her style. While her paintings harken back to the late 19th century, they also look forward to the present, drawing parallels with 21st- century artists such as Matthew Wong. This is why her paintings are popular with collectors of both Impressionist and contemporary art. The second is her tenacity. Lynne kept painting through several ordeals, including an upended childhood after her father’s suicide, her own mental struggles as a young adult, temporary colour blindness (terrifying for anyone, but especially a painter), a difficult marriage and financial hardship in her later life.” 

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