Blanche Lazzell

Blanche Lazzell (October 10, 1878 – June 1, 1956) was an American painter, printmaker and designer. Known especially for her white-line woodcuts, she was an early modernist American artist, bringing elements of Cubism and abstraction into her art.

Born in a small farming community in West Virginia, Lazzell traveled to Europe twice, studying in Paris with French artists Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and André Lhote. In 1915, she began spending her summers in the Cape Cod art community of Provincetown, Massachusetts and eventually settled there permanently. She was one of the founding members of the Provincetown Printers, a group of artists who experimented with a white-line woodcut technique based on the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Nettie Blanche Lazzell was born October 10, 1878 on a farm near Maidsville, West Virginia to Mary Prudence Pope and Cornelius Carhart Lazzell. Her father was a direct descendant of Reverend Thomas and Hannah Lazzell, pioneers who settled in Monongalia County after the American Revolutionary War.[1] The Lazzells were devout Methodists, attending the Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church. The ninth of ten children, she was nicknamed "Pet" by her older brother Rufus, a name that her family would continue to use throughout her life. She grew up on the 200 acre (0.81 km2) family farm, attending a one-room schoolhouse on the property where students from the first through eighth grades were taught from October through February. Her mother died when she was twelve.[2]

When Lazzell was fifteen, she enrolled in the West Virginia Conference Seminary (now West Virginia Wesleyan College) in Buckhannon.[3] Probably sometime prior to her entering the Seminary she became partially deaf, although the exact origin of her condition is unclear.[4] In 1894 she sought treatment from a Baltimore doctor who blamed her deafness on catarrh.[5]

In 1899, Lazzell enrolled in the South Carolina Co-educational Institute. Upon graduation later that year, she became a teacher at the Red Oaks School in Ramsey, South Carolina. In spring of 1900, she returned to Maidsville, where she tutored her younger sister, Bessie.[6]

Lazzell was matriculated into the West Virginia University (WVU) in 1901 and decided to study fine art. While her education was paid for by her father, she kept a strict account of her expenditures and took a job coloring photographs at Frieds, a studio in Morgantown. She took drawing and art history classes from William J. Leonard and studied with Eva E. Hubbard. In June 1905 Lazzell was graduated, earning her degree in fine arts.[7] She continued to study at WVU off and on until 1909, furthering her art studies and twice substituting as a painting teacher for Hubbard.[8] During this time she learned ceramics, gold etching, and china decoration.[9]

She enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in 1908 where she studied under painters Kenyon Cox and William Merritt Chase.[4][10][11] Georgia O'Keeffe attended the league during the same period, but it is not clear whether the two attended classes together.[12] In 1908, Lazzell's father died and she left the Art Students League. Lazzell grew close to her niece, Frances Reed, for whom she was a mentor and role model. For six years she served on the committee of selection for the Annual Modern Exhibition. After her return to Provincetown in 1926, Lazzell tore down her studio and had a new building constructed, as the fish house was too cold during the winter.[36] She participated in a show called "Fifty Prints of the Year" where she debuted her compositions The Violet Jug and Trees. She was particularly influenced by Gleizes and produced a series of abstract Synthetic cubist paintings based on the golden ratio, including Painting VIII.

Lazzell was a member of the international arts group Société Anonyme and was asked by artist and patron Katherine Dreier to be on its board of directors in 1928. Lazzell later joined the New York Society of Women Artists and the Society of Independent Artists.[37] Lazzell began incorporating abstract designs into her woodblocks and created designs for hooked rugs toward the end of the decade.[38] She returned to Morgantown in the winter of 1929 and offered art lessons. Among her students was Ella Sophonisba Hergesheimer.[39]

In 1934, Lazzell was one of two West Virginians who received Federal Art Project grants through the Works Progress Administration.[40] That same year she created a mural for the court room of the Morgantown courthouse entitled, Justice. The mural took fourteen weeks to complete.[9] She continued experimenting with woodprints and, in 1935, studied with the renowned German abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann in Provincetown.[41] Hofmann's push/pull spatial theory is evident in the asymmetry of her later works.[33] Lazzell's studies of flowers were inspired by her lavish potted gardens, such as Star Phlox (1931). Her 1948 floral print, Red and White Petunia, won first prize at the American Color Print Society exhibition.[42]

In 1956, Lazzell's health began to fail and she was hospitalized in Bourne, Massachusetts toward the end of May for a suspected stroke. After suffering a documented stroke, Lazzell died on June 1.[43] She is interred next to her father in Bethel Cemetery in Maidsville.

REFERENCES

Doll, Susan M. (2004). "Blanche Lazzell Biography". Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of an American Modernist. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press. ISBN 0-937058-84-X.

Shapiro, Barbara Stern (2002). From Paris to Provincetown: Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut. Boston: MFA Publications. ISBN 0-87846-629-0.

Blanche Lazzell papers, 1890–1982 (microfilm), Archives of American Art