Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist

The first monographic exhibition of her work in nearly two decades, Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist traces the artist’s pioneering approaches to abstraction in the United States. After earning a degree in fine art at West Virginia University, Blanche Lazzell pursued an education that was increasingly international and avant-garde. In 1907, she enrolled at the Art Students League in New York under the tutelage of William Merritt Chase and studied alongside classmates such as Georgia O’Keeffe. She spent 1912 in Paris, taking classes at the progressive Académie Julian and Académie Moderne headed by Charles Rosen and Charles Guérin. Upon her return to the United States the following year, she joined the vibrant artists’ colony in Provincetown, Massachusetts, becoming a student at the Cape Cod School of Art where she was exposed to Fauvist color and technique. Lazzell made a second trip to Paris in 1923 to study with the Cubists Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Albert Gleizes and, more than a decade later, she spent a year in the Provincetown studio of the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann.