Queer Places:
The Art Students League of New York, 215 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019
Académie Julian, Passage des Panoramas, 75002 Paris
Byrdcliffe Colony, 380 Upper Byrdcliffe Rd, Woodstock, NY 12498
351A Commercial St, Provincetown, MA 02657
Bethel Cemetery
Maidsville, Monongalia County, West Virginia, USA
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. Lazzell became part of what seems to have been an
all-girl network of American artists that included Ethel Mars and
Maude Hunt
Squire, Helen Hyde,
Anne Goldthwaite and
Florence Kate Upton, many of whom
were part of the circle around Gertrude Stein. There were clubs and
associations that catered to them -- including the American Women's Art
Association and the Lodge League -- as well as women-only exhibitions. While
some of these women were lesbian, Lazzelle's preferences are unclear. She
called herself a spinster and, although unusually social, always seems to have
lived alone.
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 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 boarded the SS Ivernia on
July 3, 1912, bound for Europe on a summer tour arranged by the American
Travel Club.[13] The
tour began in England and continued through the Netherlands, Belgium, and
Italy, where Lazzell studied the architecture of churches. In August she left
the tour and traveled to Paris, where she stayed at a pension in Montparnasse on
the Left Bank.
She attended lectures by Florence Heywood and Rossiter Howard, avoided the
cafe life, and joined the Students Hostel on Boulevard
Saint-Michel. While in Paris, Lazzell took classes at the Académie
de la Grande Chaumière, Académie
Julian, and Académie
Delécluse, eventually settling in at the Académie Moderne where she
studied with post-impressionist painter Charles
Guérin and David Rosen.[14] Lazzell
felt most comfortable at the Moderne, which was associated with the Parisian avant-garde.[15] She
embarked upon a six-week sketching tour of Italy with four other young women
in February 1913. The quintet returned to Paris via Germany where Lazzell
partook in her first glass of beer in Munich.[16] In
April she visited an ear specialist who removed a growth from the back of her
throat, resulting in what she characterized as "a slight improvement" in her
hearing.[17] She
continued to study with Guérin, who recognized Lazzell's inclination for landscape
art. Lazzell extended her stay in France and attended lectures at the Louvre concerning Flemish
paintings, Dutch art and
the Italian
Renaissance. She returned to the United States at the end of September,
sailing from London on the SS Arabic of
the White Star Line.[18]
Upon returning to Morgantown, Lazzell focused on painting and lived with her
sister Bessie. She held a solo
exhibition in December 1914 that included her sketches and paintings.
Lazzell rented a studio where she taught art while supporting herself through
the sales of hand-painted china.[19]
Lacking artistic stimulation in Morgantown, Lazzell journeyed to Provincetown,
Massachusetts, in 1915. Already an artists'
colony, Provincetown was a mecca for European artists escaping World War
I. Stella Johnson and Jessie Fremont Herring, two of Lazzell's companions from
her tour in Italy, were already in Provincetown and Lazzell stayed with
Johnson's mother.[16] Lazzell
took a morning outdoor painting class that summer from Charles
Webster Hawthorne at his Cape
Cod School of Art where she was exposed to Fauvist color
and technique.[20][21] She
returned to Morgantown in the autumn and held an exhibition in her studio that
October.[22]
Lazzell returned to Provincetown the following summer and requested that
painting instructor, Oliver Chaffee, teach her the white-line
woodcut technique innovated by B.J.O.
Nordfeldt and adopted by a group of artists who had spent the previous
winter in Provincetown.[23] The
white-line woodcuts were inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock
prints, but only used a single block of wood. Designs were etched into the
surface of woodblocks, with the incised lines separating sections of the
blocks. The sections were individually painted and printed onto paper with the
carved portions forming white lines. Lazzell and other artists specializing in
the white-line technique formed the Provincetown Printers, an artist
collective that later would earn national recognition. Toward the close of
1916 she traveled to Manhattan where
she studied with Homer Boss and did an analysis of color with William E.
Schumacher. Two of her pieces in the white-line style were exhibited in the
Provincetown Art Association's annual show in 1917.[22]
Originality, Simplicity, Freedom of Expression, and above all Sincerity, with
a clean cut block, are characteristics of a good wood block print. — Blanche
Lazzell[10]
In the summer of 1917, she spent time at Byrdcliffe
Colony, an artists' colony in Woodstock,
New York.[24][25] There
she studied with William Schumacher, under whom she made her first color
woodcut.[26] She
also studied with William
Zorach and Andrew
Dasburg. In the summer of 1918 Lazzell moved to Provincetown permanently,
converting an old fish house overlooking the Provincetown
Harbor into a studio.[27] She
spent the winters in Morgantown and Manhattan until 1922, always returning to
Provincetown for the summer. In addition to her involvement with the
Provincetown Printers, Lazzell was a member of the Provincetown
Art Association and the Sail Loft Club, Provincetown's women's art club.[28]
Although the bohemian atmosphere of Provincetown contrasted with Lazzell's
church-going conservative demeanor, she wove herself into a tight circle of
friends, including Ada Gilmore, Agnes
Weinrich, and Otto
Karl Knaths. She became close to Simeon C. Smith, a former WVU English
professor who had retired to Provincetown. She spent Thanksgiving with his
family in 1918 and while the couple became romantically entangled, they never
married.[29]
In 1919 Lazzell was featured in an exhibition in Manhattan at the Touchstone
Gallery alongside Weinrich, Mary Kirkup, and Flora Schoenfeld. Later that
year, the Provincetown Printers were featured at the Detroit
Institute of Arts exhibition "Wood Block Prints in Color by American
Artists". That show included Lazzell's depiction of the Monongahela
River in Morgantown The Monongahela, which was cut at Byrdcliffe in
William E. Schumacher's studio.[30] Critics
and galleries associated the Provincetown Printers with modernist schools
of painting [28] and
the artist collective continued to receive national exposure over the next few
years with exhibitions in Chicago, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and
New Orleans.[31]
Lazzell turned her old fish shack into a personal space and built large flower
boxes around her studio, allowing morning
glory and Madeira vines
to grow up to the roof. Her studio's garden became a local attraction and she
hosted teas for which she made homemade candy. During this time Lazzell
produced white-line prints and flower monoprints and
she taught painting and block printing classes.[32]
Lazzell returned to Europe in 1923 with Tannahill and Kaesche, touring
Italy and spending two months in Cassis before
settling in Paris late that summer.[33] Her
friend Flora Schoenfeld convinced her to dye her hair red in the fashion of
many women in their circle. While in Paris Lazzell studied Cubism and
geometric abstraction alongside Fernand
Léger, André Lhote,
and Albert Gleizes.[34][35] Lazzell's
work was exhibited at the Salon
d'Automne and the American Women's Club in 1923.[36] She
returned to Morgantown in August 1924 after her sister Bessie had given birth
to a son.[36]
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.[37] 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.[38] Lazzell
began incorporating abstract designs into her woodblocks and created designs
for hooked rugs toward the end of the decade.[39] She
returned to Morgantown in the winter of 1929 and offered art lessons. Among
her students was Ella
Sophonisba Hergesheimer.[40]
In 1934, Lazzell was one of two West Virginians who received Federal
Art Project grants through the Works
Progress Administration.[41] That
same year she created a mural for a court room in the Monongalia
County Courthouse entitled, Justice. The mural took fourteen weeks to
complete.[9] The
mural is currently displayed at the Art Museum of West
Virginia University in Morgantown,
WV.[42] She
continued experimenting with woodprints and, in 1935, studied with the
renowned German abstract
expressionist Hans
Hofmann in Provincetown.[43] Hofmann's
push/pull spatial theory is evident in the asymmetry of her later works.[34] 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.[44] A
collection of her prints are housed at the Art Museum of West
Virginia University.[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.[45] She
is interred next to her father in Bethel Cemetery in Maidsville.
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