Blanche Lazzell

Woodcut printed in colors, 1939, signed in ink, dated '1940' and titled 'Fatio House, St. Augustine, Fla.' in the lower margin, inscribed on the verso 'Color Wood Block Print./"Fatio House" - St Augustine, Fla. - 1940/Feb - 1940/Blanche Lazzell/493 number from all blocks to date/1 number from this block to date,' one of only two impressions of this extremely rare print, on Japan paper, together with the woodblock (Block 119), inked in colors, framed

Family of the artist
Martin and Harriette Diamond, Martin Diamond Fine Arts
Private Collection, New York

New York, Archives of American Art, New York Regional Center, Blanche Lazzell: A Modernist Revisited, 1991

Robert Bridges, Kristina Olson and Janet Snyder, eds., Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of an American Modernist, Morgantown, 2004, illustrated p. 197

The print is in good condition, with wide margins. Extremely faint mat-stain, very slightly darker at mat opening. The sheet edges slightly uneven and with a few inconspicuous printer's creases and areas of thinner paper. A few nicks along the lower sheet edge and several pin holes in the upper margin, inherent to the printing process. A 2 inch horizontal crease in the upper right margin. An occasional tiny, inconspicuous fox mark and spot of stray ink in the margins. The verso in good condition apart from a few spots of pale discoloration and very faint remnants of adhesive along the sheet edges. The woodblock is in good condition apart from three small spots of retouching in the upper left corner and a few small spots of damp-staining along the right edge. (A few inconspicuous surface scuffs visible on close inspection.)
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In his essay, "The Provincetown Print", included in Blanche Lazzell, The Life and Work of an American Modernist, David Acton states

“In 1939 Lazzell escaped the northern winter by traveling to Florida. She first visited Cuba, and then settled in the art colony of Saint Augustine, where some of her friends from Provincetown spent their winters. The handful of prints Lazzell made in Saint Augustine represent city landmarks and tropical flowers. Notable among them is The Fatio House (1939, Block 119) which depicts a famous territorial period inn standing on narrow, picturesque Aviles Street, in the center of the art quarter. Built at the end of the eighteenth century of coquina – a porous local stone of coral and shell – the building is known for its elegant proportions, colonnade and Spanish balconies. Lazzell created an accessible, realistic view of the building, which must have intrigued her as a cubist study for its suspended balconies, divided windows, dormers, and ashlar blocks. By framing her image with the edges of adjacent houses, she suggested the confined proportions of old Aviles Street. She also included the power lines overhead to further emphasize this tightness, and to fragment the sky in a manner reminiscent of her Provincetown Church Tower. Lazzell probably made this woodcut for exhibition at the Saint Augustine Arts Club in February. A few weeks later she created Aviles Street (1940, Block 120), a print that depicts another view of the Ximenez-Fatio House seen from the north. Lazzell returned to Saint Augustine occasionally during the winters of the early 1940s. She was there in 1944, when a solo exhibition of her prints was sponsored by the Arts Club of Saint Augustine.” 

Although Lazzell may be best known for her prints, she found the term insufficient to describe the white-line woodcuts that now form the most recognizable element of her oeuvre. She at times referred to them as “woodblock paintings,” but later commented “These creations cannot be compared with prints in general. They could be called by another name, but I have never arrived at a suitable one. So they go as prints and some people think I can do a hundred from each block. There are not pot boilers! Far from it!” (David Acton, "The Provincetown Print" in Blanche Lazzell: the Life and Work of and American Modernist, edited by Robert Bridges, Kristina Olson, and Janet Snyder, Morgantown, WV p. 180)

Lazzell’s process was labor-intensive, and she considered every impression pulled from a woodblock to be unique. Cutting the image from a single block, she inked the segments of the block individually, typically using French watercolors straight from the tube, and printed the image by securing the sheet with a row of tacks along one edge and rubbing the back by hand, often lifting the paper to check the progress and adjust the inking. By using thin washes and removing excess ink from the block surface, she utilized of the grain of the block to create muted passages and modulate texture within the image. The process not only produced a print with complex variation in tone and texture, but also left the block as a polychromed low-relief sculpture. Lazzell kept these blocks carefully and wrote in a letter to her cousin Grace, “I consider them my most valuable possessions.” (The artist quoted in Barbara Stern Shapiro, From Paris to Provincetown: Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut, Boston, 2002, p. 20)

Artist Biography

Nettie Blanche Lazzell was born on October 10, 1878 on a farm in Meadville,West Virginia. She was significantly hearing impaired, but loved schooling, and had a lifelong commitment to learning. In 1894, she enrolled in the West Virginia Conference Seminary (now West Virginia Wesleyan), and graduated in 1898. She continued her education at the South Carolina Co-educational Institute, receiving her diploma in 1899. In 1901, after teaching at a one-room schoolhouse in South Carolina for two years, she matriculated at the West Virginia University, where she began her study of fine art and art history. She received her bachelor’s degree in fine arts in 1905, and periodically continued to take courses in art at the university until 1909. However, in 1907, she went to New York City to study at the Art Students League for one year. She took courses with the painter William Merritt Chase, as Georgia O'Keefe did at the same time. Although these two women would later be considered the first American women artists to work in the modernist style, each of them would develop a significantly different style of expression. Lazzell’s extensive education was extremely rare for a woman at the beginning of the 20th century.

After her father’s death, she returned to West Virginia for several years, but maintained her strong desire to travel as well as to further her art education by studying with the best artists of the period. In 1912, she left for Europe, where she initially took a summer tour of some major cities, before settling in Paris to study art, first at the Academie Julien, later at the Academie Moderne. During this year she was also exposed to the creative work of many important avant-garde artists. In the fall of 1913, Lazzell returned to the United States, as did many other American writers and artists. She gave art lessons, and, in 1914, she had her first solo exhibition in Morgantown, West Virginia.

As the summer of 1915 approached, she decided to join some of her Paris friends who were visiting Provincetown, Massachusetts. This move turned out to be a seminal event in her artistic evolution. Several of the artists who were already in this remote Cape Cod community had begun to create woodblock prints using an entirely new method, and they became known as the Provincetown Printers. Each of the artists in the group contributed to this new technique of print making, but it was Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt, who made the most significant contribution. He not only simplified the method of printmaking by replacing the use of several woodblocks to create a color print with the use a single woodblock, but he also eliminated the black-line woodblock to delineate shapes, thereby resulting in what is now known as the “white-line” color print. The single woodblock was carved, each shape delineated with incised grooves. Then the colors were applied to the shapes, so that the print was made with a single impression. The artist could see the complete image on the woodblock, as a painter could see on the canvas. Consequently, the woodblock itself should be viewed as a work of art.

During that summer, Lazzell was taught this new printmaking method, and over the next few years she continued to experiment and to refine her technique until it became both very sophisticated and increasingly her own. She used more abstract shapes than the other artists and applied each vibrant color with great care and passion. Lazzell was also strongly influenced by the French cubist artists, particularly after studying cubism with Fernand Léger, André Lhote and Albert Gleizes in Paris in 1923. Eventually, she recognized that she had achieved a masterly command of the white-line print, and it is fair to state that it was she who should be credited with perfecting this method. She realized how deeply she had become involved, and started to record each woodblock and the number of prints that she made from it. Although she left Cape Cod from time to time and always considered herself to be a West Virginian, she never regretted her decision to relocate to Provincetown.