Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist
August 21 - December 13, 2026
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August 21 - December 13, 2026
Little about Blanche Lazzell would suggest that she was one of the most pioneering American artists in the first half of the 20th century. Lazzell built her path to modernism in the early 20th century. Inspired by her professors at West Virginia University, she continued her study of art beyond college through travel and focused engagement. She sought out the progressive ideals and the avant garde in New York and Paris, where the abstract approaches of fauvism and cubism influenced her art. Lazzell quietly and ambitiously produced some of the earliest abstract prints and paintings in the United States, working with determination, discipline, and a fundamental belief in the importance and responsibility of creating art.
Born in 1878 and raised in Maidsville, West Virginia —Lazzell graduated from West Virginia University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1905, when she was 27 years old. Deciding to pursue a career as an artist, she attended the Art Students League in New York City from 1907 to 1908. Through the support of her family, she toured Europe to visit the important museums then spent time in Paris to study at several art academies, a pivotal period in her professional life.
Through letters with many of her artist friends she met in Paris it was decided that they would meet up in the art colony of Provincetown, Massachusetts at the tip of Cape Cod. Lazzell made her first trip in the summer of 1915. Her arrival coincided with the local development of a new printmaking technique—the white-line color woodcut (or Provincetown print)—a medium Lazzell adopted to brilliant effect in her depictions of Cape Cod and West Virginia. Provincetown became her professional home save for a few residencies in artists’ colonies and another transformative trip to Europe in 1923–24. For the rest of her life, Lazzell would make art in Provincetown in the better seasons and Morgantown in the winter.
Lazzell’s biography conveys the facts of her life but not its substance. From her earliest student days, Lazzell was committed to making art. “Where can we see God more plainly than in art?” she rhetorically asked in 1910. This exhibition is thus focused solely on her art: the themes and subjects that occupied her and how they became laboratories for her artistic ideas. Fiercely independent, she had written to a friend in 1944, “It will be my own or nothing.” Here, then, is her own.
This exhibition is the largest ever mounted featuring over 80 works by the artist, selected from the Art Museum of WVU, whose Lazzell collection began in 1956 when the artist herself left several prints and paintings to WVU in her will. This exhibition is made possible with support from the Art Bridges Foundation, Patricia B. Bright and Mr. William T. Bright, Mr. Patrick D. Deem Esq. and Mrs. Alison H. Deem, The Jean J. and Laurence S. DeLynn Foundation, Dr. Jim Stevenson, and Dr. George Lilley and Dr. Mavis E. Grant-Lilley.