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| | Lazzell, Blanche | (American, 1878-1956) |
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| | Nettie Blanche Lazzell was born in 1878 on a farm near Maidsville, West Virginia, the ninth of ten children. Even as a young woman rendered almost completely deaf from illness, Lazzell had an ambitious character. At sixteen, Lazzell entered West Virginia Conference Seminary, receiving her degree in 1898. In 1899, she continued her studies at South Carolina Co-Educational Institute and later at West Virginia University (1901-1905). Lazzell earned degrees in liberal arts, literature, and fine arts – an unusual accomplishment for a woman at the turn of the century. In 1907, Lazzell moved to New York City and enrolled at the Art Students League where, in 1908, she studied with William Merritt Chase in a class that included Georgia O’Keeffe. In 1912, Lazzell traveled throughout Europe with a group of women before settling in Paris, where she enrolled at the Académie Julian and the Académie Moderne. She participated in numerous organizations, many exclusive to women, such as The American Women’s Art Association and the Lodge Art League. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Lazzell returned from Europe to West Virginia where she opened an art school. In the summer of 1915, she traveled to the vital art colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts to study under Charles Hawthorne. | | In the summer of 1916, Lazzell studied with Oliver Newberry Chaffee, who taught her the method of white line color woodcuts. Lazzell soon became one of the leading exponents of the color woodblock print in America, creating 138 woodblocks between 1916 and 1965. In the winters of 1916 and 1917, Lazzell returned to New York where she continued her studies. As an advocate of Modernism, she joined Société Anonyme, the avant-garde international organization that promoted and validated abstract art. In 1923, at the age of forty-five, Lazzell returned to Paris and devoted herself to the study of Cubism, studying first with Fernand Legér and later with André Lhote and Albert Gleizes. Explaining his technique for creating an abstract composition, Legér wrote an essay especially for Lazzell. Under the direction of Gleizes, Lazzell produced several series of Cubist drawings based on the “Golden Section” - an ancient mathematical method for exploring form and space in simplified Cubist composition. Lazzell closely followed Legér’s and Gleize’s teachings and her work became increasingly abstract. In 1924, Lazzell returned to West Virginia and she never again traveled to Europe. She returned to Provincetown in 1926 and thereafter Provincetown was her primary summer residence. For the next thirty years, she was an active artist, exhibiting frequently and teaching art classes in her Provincetown studio. In 1933, the Great Depression forced Lazzell to return to Morgantown, West Virginia, where she was one of two local artists employed by the Public Works of Art and the WPA. Lazzell, an influential American Cubist and a pioneer of Modernism, died in Morgantown, WV in 1956. | | Works Cited: | | www.michaelrosenfeldart.com |
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