Blanche Lazzell (1878–1956), whose works are the subject of an exhibition at the Albany Institute of History & Art, was a great American improbability. (The exhibition closes August 2, so hasten to see it.) A self-described “country maid” from the town of Maidsville, West Virginia, she was temperamentally as far from the stereotype of a bohemian artist as one could imagine. Nevertheless, Lazzell found her way to New York City, Europe, and finally Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she pursued modernist picture making with vigor and success. Lazzell’s oeuvre deserves to be known as one of the finer achievements of American art.
There is a single, though excellent, monograph on the artist: Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of an American Modernist, published by West Virginia University Press in 2004. The opening biographical section, by Susan M. Doll, reveals a restrained, circumspect character. After Lazzell graduated with a degree in fine arts from West Virginia University, she studied under William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League of New York in 1907–08. That put her at the school at the same time as Georgia O’Keeffe, who was nearly a decade her junior, and whose work she didn’t particularly care for. After a self-directed grand tour, she landed in Montparnasse in 1912. Within a year, she was studying with the Fauvists Albert Marquet and Othon Friesz, and later with the Post-Impressionist Charles-François-Prosper Guérin.
Amid the cultural ferment of early twentieth-century Paris, Lazzell was mainly interested in finding a church to attend. Her letters home included a confession of a detour through Germany, where she tried a beer. She didn’t care much for that either: she was in Europe to work, having resolved back in West Virginia to stay single and to devote herself to art. The furthest Lazzell ever ventured into impropriety was mixed-sex figure-drawing sessions at the Académie Moderne.
She eventually came to Provincetown, where she established her studio in a fish house on a pier in 1918. There she installed flower boxes, for which she became so renowned that she sold postcards of the studio’s exterior. She also became one of the most dedicated practitioners of the “Provincetown Print,” which uses the materials of traditional Japanese printmaking (mokuhanga)—woodblocks, water-based colors, and thin paper. The Provincetown version, however, entails a less fiddly method. The artist cuts the drawing out of the block with a knife. She then paints the areas left between the cut lines one at a time, transferring the applied color to a piece of paper by rubbing the reverse side with a spoon. The drawing remains as an unprinted negative on the paper, hence the medium is also known as a “white-line woodcut.” The method produces a single print, but the artist can make more from the same block with ease of configuration unique among printmaking methods.
There were earlier practitioners of the Provincetown Print, about whom I’ve written in these pages. But Lazzell was the first among them to make a thorough study of Cubism. White-line woodcut is especially suited to Cubist rendering, as it breaks the image into planes and holds it together using the white of the paper itself. Roofs (1918) demonstrates how Lazzell mastered the medium nearly upon introduction to it. It is an immensely charming view of Provincetown architecture, with sunflower blooms gracing the foreground as platters of gold.
Lazzell’s presence at museums is usually in the form of one of her marvelous prints. The Albany Institute show, though, runs heavy to Lazzell’s oil paintings, which is edifying. In 1923, she returned to Montparnasse, which gave her the opportunity to study with Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Albert Gleizes, who styled himself, not entirely spuriously, as the founder of Cubism. Her studies inspired a series of paintings executed in 1924–27 that seem to rework the same Cubist still life. They’re curiously colored with a palette of teal, violet, and ochre. Though her efforts missed the heyday of analytical Cubism by two decades, these sorts of paintings were rare in America at the time, and few painters achieved this level of pictorial sophistication. Her better passages recall those of Stuart Davis.
One wonders what might have happened if the Great Depression hadn’t intervened in her career, obliging her to retreat to her family in Morgantown, West Virginia, and take assignments from the Works Progress Administration, which she finally concluded was an elaborate ruse to help reelect Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After she returned to Provincetown, her art seemed to be inspired by a longing for revenge on the conventionality of West Virginia and the WPA. The paintings are worthy, but The White Petunia (1932) is an unalloyed triumph that could hang proudly next to a good Braque. The coloration is subdued and gorgeous, and despite its subject of a vase of flowers, the compositional pressure in the print feels enormous.
In 1937, Lazzell, almost sixty, enrolled in classes at the Provincetown atelier of the Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann. Hofmann drew a new generation of talent to the region, including the painters Adolph Gottlieb and Karl Knaths. (Lazzell referred to them as “the boys.”) This period is represented in the exhibition by a few of Lazzell’s exuberant charcoal drawings that evince the energy of a much younger artist. With Planes II (printed in 1952), it’s as though the times had finally caught up with Lazzell. It’s a handsome geometric abstraction that fits squarely within that decade’s departure from Expressionist tendencies, but the intersection was a case of a sharp art-historical turn crossing Lazzell’s long road.
Lazzell’s character coupled a personal conservatism with an abiding commitment to advanced art. At once a dedicated churchgoer and an astute follower of the latest developments in New York and Paris, Lazzell was a master who never gave up being a student. Her work is singular, and it merits consideration for joining your list of favorites.
