2 minute read
BLANCHE LAZZELL
Pioneers of the PROVINCETOWN PRINT
By | Bill Evaul
Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956), was born in Maidsville, West Virginia and excelled at her studies, earning multiple degrees in literature, art and art history before moving to New York City in 1908 to study at the Art Students League with William Merrit Chase and his assistant Charles Hawthorne. She then spent a few years in Paris where she attended the Académie Moderne.
Lazzell returned to America in 1915, heading to Provincetown to study with Hawthorne. She set up her own studio right next door to Nordfeldt who, along with Oliver Chaffee, encouraged Lazzell’s modernist sensibility. When she saw the woodcut prints that Nordfeldt, Ada Gilmore, Juliette Nichols and the others were making, she got Chaffee to show her the basic technique. She joined the group and began a lifelong career of making and teaching white-line color woodcuts.
In 1923, Lazzell went to Paris again, this time to study with the great cubist painters, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and André L’Hôte. Upon meeting this outwardly conservative woman, one would not have associated her with the authoritative, non-objective painting style that she so deftly handled. She arrived at her purely synthetic cubist approach without any evidence of groping through semi-abstract or analytic styles. Lazzell’s work was shown at the Salon d’Automne in Paris for several years.
In 1925 she returned again to Provincetown where she would live for the rest of her life, taking occasional trips to New York City and back home to West Virginia. Lazzell continued painting and making prints in her cubist style and furthered her modernist sensibility studying with German Abstract Expressionist Hans Hofmann. She created a second generation of white-line woodcut artists by continuing to teach right up until her death in 1956.
