Blanche Lazzell

BLANCHE LAZZELL

b. 1878, Monongalia County, West Virginia
d. 1956, Bourne, Massachusetts

Blanche Lazzell was a painter and printmaker, and one of the few female pioneers of Modernist American art. In 1908 she enrolled in classes at the Art Student League of New York, and three years later she traveled to Europe, visiting England, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy before finally settling in Paris where she attended classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, the Académie Julian, the Académie Delécluse and the Académie Moderne. After two years Lazzell returned to the United States, and in 1915 she moved to the growing artist colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts. She was a founding member of the Provincetown Printers, who utilized Japanese woodblock techniques to create avant-garde works. Lazzell developed her own unique hybrid of Cubism and Abstract Expressionism with her white-line woodblock prints. In 1923 Lazzell returned for a brief stint in Paris, where she studied Cubism with Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and André Lhote, and exhibited in the Salon d'Automne of that year. Her works are owned by major American public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York.