Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist
Changing Art Gallery, Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT • brucemuseum.org • Through April 27, 2025
Fauvism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism all factored into Blanche Lazzell’s masterful white line woodcuts and paintings. Bruce Museum visitors are offered a rare glimpse at the work of this 20th century artist. At a time when only women of means had access to art training and even fewer had the chance to establish working studios and professional careers, Lazzell was a standout. This is the first monographic exhibition of her work in nearly two decades.
Lazzell had an extensive arts education, earning an undergraduate degree in fine art at West Virginia University, furthering her studies in New York, Paris, and Provincetown, MA. She took classes alongside Georgia O’Keeffe at the Art Students League in New York, and worked with Cubists Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Albert Gleizes in Paris while a student at Académie Julian and Académie Moderne. She studied with Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann after putting down roots in Provincetown, MA. It was during her years in Provincetown, where she taught and maintained a studio, that she became known as a master of white line woodcuts. Her bright hues, simplified forms, and a flat Japanese aesthetic was an amalgam of influences that she distilled into a uniquely American–and highly personal—art form.
Women of talent and means flocked to Paris in the early part of the 20th century for the freedom it offered. Afterwards when Lazzell set up in Provincetown, she did not have a key patron, as O’Keeffe had in Alfred Stieglitz. Her smallish prints —which were easy to frame, wrap, and ship for inclusion in exhibitions—were at times perhaps dismissed as of lesser quality to painting. And, there was the matter of her family’s decision to donate her works after her death in 1956 to the West Virginia University Art Museum, in effect removing her art from major markets. The exhibition, featuring more than sixty paintings, prints, and unique works on paper, acts as a curative.
Bruce Museum curator Jordan Hillman singles out Lazzell’s Provincetown Church series that moves from charcoal preparatory drawing to woodblock to white-line print, and finally to oil painting. It was undertaken the year before her second trip to Paris, and offers “a unique glimpse into Lazzell’s creative process but also anticipates the increasingly abstract and flattened quality of her later work,” she said.
The Bruce’s presentation is unique—it’s organized chronologically, has new didactic materials, works from the Museum and local collectors, and incorporates an in-gallery interactive space. The exhibition will travel to the Albany Institute of History and Art and then to the Provincetown Art Association.
— Kristin Nord