Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist

Provincetown Art Association and Museum

By: PAAM - Jul 22, 2025

This exhibition surveys the full career of American modernist Blanche Lazzell (1878–1956). Celebrated for her masterful white-line woodblock prints, Lazzell considered herself a painter first and foremost—from her early days studying in West Virginia, New York, and Paris through Depression-era Federal Art Projects and as a longtime resident of Provincetown’s vibrant art colony.

Born and raised in the small community of Maidsville, West Virginia, Lazzell graduated from West Virginia University with a degree in fine arts in 1905. Seeking further instruction, she first enrolled in the Art Students League in New York City and then went on two extensive trips to Europe. There she immersed herself in the studios of avant-garde artists who explored abstraction through the new movements of Fauvism and Cubism. Lazzell embraced these influences in her own work, creating some of the first non-objective prints and paintings seen in this country. She eventually settled in the artist colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she worked with Charles Hawthorne and Hans Hofmann, co-founded the Provincetown Printers, and became a leading figure in white-line color woodblock printmaking.

Including more than 50 paintings, prints, and unique works on paper drawn primarily from the Art Museum of West Virginia University’s permanent collection, the exhibition explores the artist’s lifelong pursuit of translating Modernism into an American art form and celebrates her achievements in championing abstraction in the United States.

The Art Bridges funding supported the development of Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist, the most comprehensive exhibition devoted to the artist to date. This exhibition centers on a suite of large-scale abstract paintings she made in the 1920s that were among the most ambitious paintings for any American at the time. These paintings—amalgams of the European avant-garde worked through an American idiom—are even more remarkable for being created by a female artist from West Virginia driven by a single-minded devotion to modernist principles. Related sections of the exhibition showcase Lazzell’s winding paths through abstraction, realism, process, and media; these sections build an artistic context around these abstractions of the 1920s and demonstrate the centrality of these paintings to her professional career and personal trajectory. 

The exhibition is designed to introduce Lazzell’s truly groundbreaking work to a broad audience, to assert that Lazzell’s advanced thinking interrogates our existing modernist canon, and to offer visitors an onramp into artistic abstraction. Including more than 50 paintings, prints, and works on paper drawn primarily from the Art Museum of West Virginia University’s permanent collection, Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist explores the artist’s lifelong pursuit of translating modernism into an American art form and celebrates her largely unsung achievements in creating and championing abstract art in the United States.

Top Image: Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956), The White Petunia, block cut 1932, printed 1954, color woodblock print, 14 1/2 x 12 5/8 in. Art Museum of West Virginia University Collection, gift of James C. and Janet G. Reed.