Blanche Lazzell

Blanche Lazzell was born October 10, 1878, in Maidsville, a small farming community in Monongalia County, West Virginia. She attended a one-room schoolhouse on the family farm before enrolling at the West Virginia Conference Seminary in Buckhannon in 1894 and later the South Carolina Co-educational Institute in Edgefield, where she graduated in 1899 and briefly taught school. In 1901 she matriculated at West Virginia University to study fine art, graduating in June 1905 with a degree in art history and the fine arts, and continued informal study there, including ceramics and china decoration, through 1909.

She moved to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League around 1907 to 1909; her studies there were interrupted for a period after her father's death. In 1912 she traveled to Paris and took classes at the Academie Julian and the Academie Moderne. By 1915 she had settled into the art colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts, studying at the Cape Cod School of Art and becoming part of the Provincetown Printers, the circle of artists associated with the single-block, white-line color woodcut; she went on to become one of the technique's leading practitioners.

A second trip to Paris in 1923 and 1924 brought direct instruction in Cubism and geometric abstraction from Fernand Leger, Andre Lhote, and Albert Gleizes, and her work was shown that year at the Salon d'Automne and at the American Women's Club in Paris. During the Depression she worked as a professional artist within the federal art projects. She continued painting and printmaking in Provincetown for the rest of her career.

She died on June 1, 1956, at age 77. Museum sources, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, record her place of death as Morgantown, West Virginia.

Lazzell's critical standing has shifted markedly over the past decade, from a footnote in Provincetown modernism to a central subject of museum scholarship. The 2022 traveling exhibition "Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist," organized by the Art Museum of West Virginia University and shown at institutions including the Academy Art Museum, the Albany Institute of History and Art, and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, surveyed her full career and positioned her as a pioneer who translated Parisian Cubism into an American printmaking idiom. Curatorial writing around the exhibition consistently emphasizes her white-line woodcuts and her early embrace of nonobjective composition, framing her as one of the first American women to work in a fully abstract mode. No verbatim, attributable review from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile.

Lazzell's auction market is modest in scale relative to her institutional standing. Her documented auction high is Painting XI (The Windmill), an oil that sold for USD 505,000 at Sotheby's New York in 2008; the exact sale date has not been confirmed in available sources. Market databases show conflicting figures for her print prices, from a reported USD 120,000 in 2021 (work and house unnamed) to an aggregate USD 162,500 cited elsewhere; the most specifically documented print sale is the white-line woodcut Sail Boat, which reached USD 106,200 at auction on August 3, 2012, though the selling house for that sale is not identified in available sources. Market databases record several hundred auction appearances for the artist over time, the large majority of them prints rather than paintings, and prices for individual works have varied widely by medium, subject, and condition.

No catalogue raisonne of Lazzell's work has been identified, so provenance and authentication rest on documented exhibition history, museum records, and her representing gallery, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. Her market is thin and print-heavy: the small number of paintings that reach auction can command prices well above her typical print results, so any single sale should be read in the context of medium and subject rather than as a stand-in for the whole market. Her two most cited results, the 2008 painting record and the 2012 print sale, both lack a confirmed exact sale date or a confirmed auction house in the sources reviewed, an example of the documentation gaps collectors should expect for artists whose market history predates comprehensive online auction records.