46 Facts About Blanche Lazzell

Blanche Lazzell was an American painter, printmaker and designer.

Blanche Lazzell 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.

Blanche Lazzell's father was a direct descendant of Reverend Thomas and Hannah Lazzell, pioneers who settled in Monongalia County after the American Revolutionary War.

When Blanche Lazzell was fifteen, she enrolled in the West Virginia Conference Seminary in Buckhannon.

In 1899, Blanche Lazzell enrolled in the South Carolina Co-educational Institute.

Blanche Lazzell was matriculated into the West Virginia University in 1901 and decided to study fine art.

Blanche Lazzell took drawing and art history classes from William J Leonard and studied with Eva E Hubbard.

In June 1905 Blanche Lazzell was graduated, earning her degree in fine arts.

Blanche Lazzell continued to study at WVU off and on until 1909, furthering her art studies and twice substituting as a painting teacher for Hubbard.

Blanche Lazzell enrolled in the Art Students League of New York in 1908 where she studied under painters Kenyon Cox and William Merritt Chase.

In 1908, Blanche Lazzell's father died and she left the Art Students League.

Blanche Lazzell boarded the SS Ivernia on July 3,1912, bound for Europe on a summer tour arranged by the American Travel Club.

The tour began in England and continued through the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy, where Blanche Lazzell studied the architecture of churches.

Blanche Lazzell attended lectures by Florence Heywood and Rossiter Howard, avoided the cafe life, and joined the Students Hostel on Boulevard Saint-Michel.

Blanche Lazzell felt most comfortable at the Moderne, which was associated with the Parisian avant-garde.

Blanche Lazzell 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 Blanche Lazzell partook in her first glass of beer in Munich.

Blanche Lazzell continued to study with Guerin, who recognized Lazzell's inclination for landscape art.

Blanche Lazzell extended her stay in France and attended lectures at the Louvre concerning Flemish paintings, Dutch art and the Italian Renaissance.

Blanche Lazzell held a solo exhibition in December 1914 that included her sketches and paintings.

Blanche Lazzell rented a studio where she taught art while supporting herself through the sales of hand-painted china.

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.

Blanche 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.

Blanche Lazzell spent the winters in Morgantown and Manhattan until 1922, always returning to Provincetown for the summer.

Blanche Lazzell became close to Simeon C Smith, a former WVU English professor who had retired to Provincetown.

Blanche Lazzell spent Thanksgiving with his family in 1918 and while the couple became romantically entangled, they never married.

In 1919 Blanche Lazzell was featured in an exhibition in Manhattan at the Touchstone Gallery alongside Weinrich, Mary Kirkup, and Flora Schoenfeld.

Blanche 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.

Blanche 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.

Blanche Lazzell's work was exhibited at the Salon d'Automne and the American Women's Club in 1923.

Blanche Lazzell returned to Morgantown in August 1924 after her sister Bessie had given birth to a son.

Blanche Lazzell grew close to her niece, Frances Reed, for whom she was a mentor and role model.

Blanche Lazzell participated in a show called "Fifty Prints of the Year" where she debuted her compositions The Violet Jug and Trees.

Blanche Lazzell was particularly influenced by Gleizes and produced a series of abstract Synthetic cubist paintings based on the golden ratio, including Painting VIII.

Blanche Lazzell was a member of the international arts group Societe Anonyme and was asked by artist and patron Katherine Dreier to be on its board of directors in 1928.

Blanche Lazzell later joined the New York Society of Women Artists and the Society of Independent Artists.

Blanche Lazzell began incorporating abstract designs into her woodblocks and created designs for hooked rugs toward the end of the decade.

Blanche Lazzell returned to Morgantown in the winter of 1929 and offered art lessons.

In 1934, Blanche Lazzell was one of two West Virginians who received Federal Art Project grants through the Works Progress Administration.

Blanche Lazzell continued experimenting with woodprints and, in 1935, studied with the renowned German abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann in Provincetown.

In 1956, Blanche Lazzell's health began to fail and she was hospitalized in Bourne, Massachusetts, toward the end of May for a suspected stroke.

Blanche Lazzell is interred next to her father in Bethel Cemetery in Maidsville.

Blanche Lazzell was among the earliest women artists in the United States to work in a modernist style.

Blanche Lazzell's paintings demonstrated a rich and nuanced use of color.

Blanche Lazzell preferred French watercolor pigments that, alongside the grain of the woodblocks, created embossed lines and striated patterns.