Spy Art Review: American Modernist Blanche Lazzell by Steve Parks

Blanche Lazzell never achieved great fame – or fortune for that matter. But she was widely admired by fellow artists, several of whom she studied with or were tutored in her signature technique, which is captured in several of her woodblock prints in the Academy Art Museum exhibit of her wide-ranging works in “Becoming an American Modernist.”

Of course, however accomplished women artists born in the 19th century and who continued to create and exhibit their works into the mid-20th, they were rarely recognized with the popular and critical attention that male artists enjoyed.

Lazzell, the ninth of 10 children born in 1878 near the West Virginia farming community of Maidsville – went on to graduate West Virginia University with a degree in fine arts. Determined to make a career of it, Lazzell enrolled in the Art Students League of New York where she studied with William Merritt Chase and Georgia O’Keeffe, who unlike most contemporary artists of her gender would gain international acclaim.

In an early turning point in her career, Lazzell sailed to Europe where she found her niche at the Academie Moderne in Paris, studying with post-impressionist painter Charles Guerin, and on her second stay in France studying Cubism alongside Fernand Leger. Between trips abroad, she spent the first of 40 summers in Provincetown on Cape Cod, thriving in the company of the blooming art colony there and was influenced by German abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann.

All these threads of her remarkable career are evident in the the Academy Art’s subtitles that organize this comprehensive exhibition beginning in the Lederer Gallery with “Petunias, Provincetown and Process,” which bears witness to the introductory wall-label statement from the artist herself: “Often I can’t get a thing out of my system with just one print.” So, moving on from the lovely 1932 white-line block print “The White Petunia,” we encounter the solo “White Petunia’ of her 1943 monotype, “Petunias” of various colors in the 1934 monotype, followed by the 1940 “One Petunia” on paper, and, in the final statement on the subject, a ruddy red untitled petunia captured in her 1943 watercolor. Finally, images switch from flowers to Provincetown where she maintained a home studio adorned by potted flowers she lovingly tended. The new repeating subject here is “The Provincetown Church Tower,” starting with a 1921 graphite on paper and continuing with five more images of the same tower through 1922.

 

The first image under the heading of “Coming Home to Abstraction” with the large 1952 block print masterpiece “Planes II,” which caught our eye from across the gallery as we first entered. This woodcut print of colliding geometric shapes and complementary colors, all narrowly separated by distinct white lines – one of the finest of her career – was executed late in her life. She died in 1956. A series of purely abstract paintings-on-board squigglies from the 1940s follows, punctuated by a pair of geomatics from the early ’50s, anticipating “Planes II,” as if they were oil-on-canvas studies.

“Abstractions of the 1920s,” Lazzell’s breakthrough decade, brings this gallery full circle with “Painting VIII” and subsequent works of varied Roman numerals. Some bring to my mind a few famous abstract suggestions of musical instruments, though unlike Picasso, Lazzell never hinted at what these objects might be. The only exception in this section is the final “Abstract Windmill” study for a tempera painting not part of this exhibit. You won’t have to guess that the image represents a windmill.

Moving across the hall to the Healy Gallery, we encounter diverse examples of “Understanding Abstractions” as Lazzell explores various means of expression during early years, beginning with “Roofs,” a 1918 woodblock print that looks more like a painting with sharply angled rooftops reaching toward a towering treetop. An untitled 1915 oil on canvas of a Provincetown manse upstaged by sprawling trees and a foreground boat is more impressionistic than abstract. Falling somewhere in between is another oil, a lush “Hollyhock” that brings Van Gogh’s 1899 “Irises” and others among his floral still lifes to my mind.

Skipping over for now the next section of architectural scenes, Lazzell’s “Still Lifes” take many forms, ranging from her highly abstract 1942 oil-on-canvas “Shell,” said to be that of a conch alongside cockeyed flowers, to her standard 1927 “Still Life” painting of fruit in a bowl with a side of flowers in a vase. Others expand the subject matter far afield to “Beach Combings,” her 1931 linoleum block print to the final image in the show, a 1939 “Still Life” oil influenced by her teacher-student relationship with Hoffman. It focuses on what appears to be a skeletal portion of a large animal, likely a cow.

“The Built Environment” phase of her career offers more or less representational scenes, mostly from Provincetown and West Virginia. They range from “Provincetown Suburbs,”  a 1940 oil that seems to foresee lyrical imagery suggested by the 1962 Malvina Reynolds song “Little Boxes,” to her semi-abstract “Campus,” 1934 block print depicting a view of Lazzell’s West Virginia alma mater, and the colorful 1935 woodblock “Provincetown Waterfront,” which was not printed until 1956, three months before her death. It is possibly the last artwork Lazzell completed.

While she was appreciated by her fellow artists as a woodcut pioneer and in developing abstract art in the United States, Lazzell’s work faded into obscurity after her passing. But her art has been rediscovered in recent years. In 2012, her 1931 white-line block print “Sail Boat” sold for $106,200 at auction.