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Follow the journey of one of the United States’ first abstract artists and discover her interdisciplinary approach in Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist, on view Feb. 6-April 27, 2025, at the Bruce Museum. The exhibition honors the largely unsung artist with more than 60 paintings, prints, and other works on paper. It is the first monographic show of her work in nearly 20 years.

The American painter, printmaker, and designer championed abstract art in the early 20th century with works that translated European modernism into an American art form. While she experimented with post-impressionism, pointillism, cubism, and abstraction, she was best known for her innovative printmaking technique. By cutting a design into a soft block of wood, then inking and transferring its individual sections one by one, Lazzell produced prints that were highly unique, with translucent colors floating within the white boundaries left by her incised lines. Over her career, she produced more than 100 woodcuts using this white-line technique.

Becoming an American Modernist is a testament to Blanche Lazzell’s ingenuity. Her early adoption and advocacy of abstraction in the United States, exemplified by her masterful white-line woodcuts, inspired a generation of artists to embrace bold colors and flattened forms. Showcasing Lazzell’s work in various media across different stages of her career, ‘Becoming an American Modernist’ invites visitors to trace this visionary female artist’s highly independent path to modernism,” said Jordan Hillman, a curatorial associate at the Bruce Museum.

Lazzell dedicated her life to learning and experimenting with art. The West Virginia native earned a degree in fine art from West Virginia University and studied at the Art Students League in New York, where William Merritt Chase was her instructor and Georgia O’Keeffe was a classmate. She later set sail for Europe and studied at various academies in Paris, where she found the geometric abstraction that she would later experiment with while attending the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts. In 1916, Lazzell joined several artists who exhibited their color woodblock works and established the Provincetown Printers group, the first-ever color woodblock society in the United States. Years later, she returned to Paris, where she studied cubism with Fernand Léger, before studying for a year with abstract artist Hans Hofmann and making Provincetown her home.

Lazzell often found inspiration in her scenic surroundings in Provincetown and produced picturesque landscapes and still lifes such as Hollyhock (1917), a painting on view in the exhibition that presents vibrant buds set against lush greenery. Nature also surfaced in her color woodblock prints such as The White Petunia, an abstract depiction of large red and white blossoms. Planes II (1952), produced late in her career, presents geometric shapes in varying shades of red, green, yellow, and gray separated by her signature thin white lines. Visitors to the exhibition will have the opportunity to test Lazzell’s various techniques for themselves in an adjacent interactive space.

 Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist is organized by the Art Museum of West Virginia University with generous support provided by Art Bridges.