Bruce Museum Exhibit: Blanche Lazzell – Becoming an American Modernist

“Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist” is an exhibit at The Bruce Museum running through April 27.

It marks the first monographic exhibition of the artist’s work in nearly two decades.

As one of the United States’ first abstract artists, the painter, printmaker and designer translated European modernisms into an American art form.

The Bruce Museum’s presentation chronicles Lazzell’s career that spanned approximately four decades, foregrounding her contributions as a pioneer and champion of abstract art in the 20th century.

The exhibition also offers insight into the education and inspiration she found in her native West Virginia; her decades spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts; and her travels to New York, Paris and Saint Augustine, Florida.

“Becoming an American Modernist” offers a unique chronological examination of Blanche Lazzell’s artistic practice. More than 60 works on view trace her experimentation with a range of artistic styles, from impressionism and fauvism to cubism and abstraction. Pencil drawings and tempera sketches for several of the abstract paintings accompany the final products, showing Lazzell’s methodology for arranging geometric shapes.

The exhibition also highlights her innovation of the white-line printmaking technique, meticulously cutting a design into a soft block of wood before inking and transferring each section individually to create prints of astonishing uniqueness. In each work, the translucent colors seem to float within the crisp white lines left by her precise incisions.

Lazzell created more than 100 blocks between 1916 and 1956. During that time, she experimented with a black-line technique just twice. Visitors will get an up-close look at her experimental process with “Provincetown Church Tower” (1922). In this series, Lazzell carved a white-line block as well as a key block — a traditional block in which the structural elements of her design remain raised to accept ink. She then used this key block to add a black outline over the white-line print, resulting in an impression that resembles the cloisonné aesthetic of Paul Gauguin. Finally, she translated the same composition to canvas, exploring the possibilities of color, surface and luminosity in paint.

Lazzell, an avid gardener, also found great inspiration in nature for her paintings and woodblock prints.

“Hollyhock” (1917), an oil on canvas work, presents vibrant red and pink buds against lush greenery. “Shell” (1930) combines Lazzell’s love for nature and abstraction with reduced forms of a conch shell and flowers resting on a collage of multi-patterned planes. “The White Petunia” (block cut 1932, printed 1954) offers an abstract depiction of large red and white blossoms.

The exhibition invites visitors to dive deeper into Lazzell’s creative process in the Modernist Studio, an interactive space where visitors can experiment with abstraction and composition, learn about the tools and processes of the Provincetown Printers Group and share their own creative responses to Lazzell’s work.

Blanche Lazzell dedicated her life to learning and experimenting with art. Born and raised in West Virginia, she earned degrees in fine art, liberal arts and literature from West Virginia University and studied at the Art Students League in New York, where William Merritt Chase was her instructor and Georgia O’Keeffe was a classmate. She later set sail for Europe and studied at various academies in Paris, where she discovered the principles of abstraction with which she would later experiment while attending the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Her arrival in Provincetown coincided with the local invention of the white-line color woodcut that she adapted for her artistic practice. In 1916, Lazzell joined several artists who exhibited their color woodblock works and established the Provincetown Printers Group, the first-ever color woodblock society in the United States. Years later, she returned to Paris, where she studied cubism with Fernand Léger, André Lhote and Albert Gleizes, before studying for a year with abstract artist Hans Hofmann in Provincetown. While she also spent the summer of 1917 at the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock, New York and most winters between 1940 and 1944 in St. Augustine, Florida, her time in Provincetown shaped her artistic identity.

“Becoming an American Modernist’ is a testament to Blanche Lazzell’s ingenuity. Her early adoption and advocacy of abstraction in the United States, exemplified by her masterful white-line woodcuts, inspired a generation of artists to embrace bold colors and flattened forms. Showcasing Lazzell’s work in various media across different stages of her career, ‘Becoming an American Modernist’ invites visitors to trace this visionary female artist’s highly independent path to modernism,” said Jordan Hillman, curatorial associate, Bruce Museum.

The Bruce Museum is located at 1 Museum Drive in Greenwich, CT . Admission is $20, $15 for students.