Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist surveys the pioneering artist’s lifelong pursuit of translating Modernism into an American art form and celebrates her largely unsung achievements in championing abstraction in the United States through painting and printmaking. Celebrated for her masterful white-line woodblock prints, Blanche Lazzell (1878–1956) considered herself a painter first and foremost—from her early days studying in West Virginia, New York, and Paris through Depression-era Federal Art Projects and as a longtime resident of Provincetown’s vibrant art colony.
Born and raised in the small community of Maidsville, West Virginia, Lazzell graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in fine arts in 1905. Seeking further instruction, she first enrolled in the Art Students League in New York City, she worked in Woodstock, New York, at the Byrdcliffe Artist’s Colony, and then went on two extensive trips to Europe. There she immersed herself in the studios of avant-garde artists who explored abstraction through the new movements of Fauvism and Cubism. Lazzell embraced these influences in her own work, creating some of the first non-objective prints and paintings seen in this country. She eventually settled in the artist colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she worked with Hans Hofmann, co-founded the Provincetown Printers, and became a leading figure in white-line color woodblock printmaking.
Including more than 50 paintings, prints, and unique works on paper drawn primarily from the Art Museum of West Virginia University’s permanent collection and supported by Art Bridges, the exhibition centers on a suite of large-scale abstract paintings Lazzell made in the 1920s that were among the most ambitious paintings for any American at the time. These paintings—amalgams of the European avant-garde worked through an American idiom—are even more remarkable for being created by a female artist from West Virginia driven by a singular devotion to modernist principles. Related sections of the exhibition showcase Lazzell’s winding paths through abstraction, realism, process, and media, which build an artistic context around the abstractions of the 1920s and demonstrate the centrality of these paintings to her professional career and personal trajectory.
