Upon her death in 1956, a portion of the work and personal ephemera of American artist Blanche Lazzell was sent to the Art Museum of West Virginia University (AMWVU) in Morgantown: brightly colored paintings and prints, along with charcoal drawings, personal diaries, and letters to her family and friends. But this vast assemblage of the artist’s creative output hasn’t just been kept in storage by her alma mater (Lazzell graduated from the college in 1905); more than sixty objects from the collection are traveling the United States in the exhibition Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist.
Currently on view at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, until April 27, Becoming an American Modernist illustrates how Lazzell became a master printmaker and one of America’s first female modernists. The exhibition was created by AMWVU curator and de facto Lazzell expert Robert Bridges, who, after years of uncovering Lazzell’s art, and writing the book Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of an American Modernist (2004), organized the exhibition to bring his discoveries to the wider world. The show was expanded to a traveling program with the help of the Art Bridges Foundation. “We wanted to do a career-spanning exhibition so people could really understand her trajectory and [understand] her as a pioneer in abstraction in the United States,” Bridges explains.
Born on a farm near the state line of West Virginia and Pennsylvania in 1878, Lazzell was never a woman to stay in one place. Beginning her travels as a teen, she bounced around educational institutions up and down the East Coast before ultimately earning a degree in fine art at West Virginia University. She then enrolled at the Art Students League of New York, and in the 1910s and 1920s took trips to Europe to study art and visit the cubist and fauvist studios of avant-garde artists such as Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Albert Gleizes.
But where Lazzell experienced perhaps the most artistic growth was in the salty air of Provincetown, Massachusetts. She arrived in 1915 to study at the Cape Cod School of Art, and would go on to become a fixture of the area’s burgeoning artist community, which was populated by abstract artists driven out of Europe by World War I. When she was presented with the opportunity to learn white-line woodblock printing, Lazzell jumped in with both feet. The method presented a less laborious solution to making colorful prints than the multi-block Japanese process, with a line drawing transposed onto a single block of wood via carving (these carved lines came out white in prints made from the block), then painting the spaces between the lines with inks in various colors. “The nature of the white lines allowed her to create compositions that were strikingly modern,” explains Bridges. “She was interested in abstracting form, mostly in composition and color, and creating something modern in that regard.” As she perfected this skill, Lazzell co-founded the first color-blocking society, the Provincetown Printers Group.
Lazzell’s prints read like diaries. Planes II’s (1952) bright coloring and flat shapes recall her artistic education in modernist techniques and thinking. Works like The White Petunia take viewers into her interior life, in this case by showcasing a vase full of petunias, a flower commonly found in her Provincetown studio.
“She had some importance in American art,” says Bruce Museum curatorial associate Jordan Hillman. “She was a working artist who continued to exhibit throughout her life, and her exhibitions were nationally recognized. . . . She was an important person in the movement toward abstraction, and she’s kind of this unsung figure in its development in the US.”
Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist • Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut • February 6 to April 27 • brucemuseum.org
