Blanche Lazzell
- Also known as
- Nettie Blanche Lazzell
- Born
- Maidsville, West Virginia, United States
- Died
- Morgantown, West Virginia, United States
- Active in
- Paris, France
- Provincetown, Massachusetts, United States
- Biography
Born near Maidsville, West Virginia, Blanche Lazzell enrolled at the West Virginia Conference Seminary (now West Virginia Wesleyan College) in 1894. After attending South Carolina Co-Educational Institute in Edgefield in 1899, she studied art at West Virginia University, receiving a degree in art history and the fine arts in 1905. She moved to New York in 1907 and enrolled at the Art Students League, where she studied with William Merritt Chase and alongside Georgia O'Keeffe. Lazzell traveled throughout Europe in 1912 and took classes in Paris at the Academie Julian and the Academie Moderne headed by Charles Guerin and Charles Rosen. By 1913, Lazzell had returned to West Virginia and opened a school. In 1915 she attended the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which had become a meeting place for artists returning from Europe to escape the chaos of World War I. In 1916 Lazzell and several other artists exhibited their work in color woodblock at the studio of E. Ambrose Webster. With the success of this show, the Provincetown Printers Group became the first color-woodblock society to be established. During a trip to Europe in 1923, Lazzell studied cubism with Fernand Leger and also received instruction from Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes. She returned to America in 1924, and from 1937 to 1938 studied with the abstract artist Hans Hofmann.
Joann Moser Singular Impressions: The Monotype in America (Washington, D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1997)