Lynne Drexler: The First Decade

Imagine a story of an artist who escaped from an art world rife with competition and her struggle to find herself, landing on an enchanted island, where she lived happily ever after, painting, though forgotten, for the rest of her life. She went so far as to write to a friend what her dealer could tell collectors who inquired about her: “advise them I’d become a hermit—an eccentric one and that I come to NYC when provided with orches- tra seats to the MET, clubhouse tickets to the racetrack and absolutely no talk of art or the scene.” After her death in 1999, her paintings got discovered and collectors now compete to own them. This is the unlikely story of Lynne Drexler, a woman artist whose colorful and engaging pictures speak for themselves, though they don’t necessarily reveal the drama of her life.

Born Lynne Mapp Drexler in southeastern Virginia on May 21, 1928, she spent her early childhood near Newport News, then moved around with her parents from this corner of the state down the coast to Wilmington, North Carolina. Late in life, she recalled “my childhood before World War II was marvelous.” Known to her parents as “Lyndy,” she was the only child of Lynne Powell Drexler (1892–1963) and Norman E. Drexler (1892–1944), who managed a public utility until his death at fifty-two by suicide. At the time in 1944, their daughter, just sixteen, was attending St. Anne’s Belfield High School, a co-educational, independent boarding and day school in Charlottesville, Virginia.