Hometown artist Blanche Lazzell receives new exposure in a lovingly curated exhibition of WVU-held works that will travel in 2024 and 2025.
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In the spring of 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston hosted an exhibition of Morgantown-native artist Blanche Lazzell. The New York Times gushed, calling Lazzell “a wizard of form.”
It also called her “perennially overlooked.”
Both were true. But a major West Virginia University exhibition soon followed, in 2004. As holder of the largest public collection of Lazzell’s extensive works, WVU was able to assemble a show spanning her rich half-century career, including prints, paintings, drawings, and decorative items—“the broadest overview of her work to date,” Robert Bridges, then curator of the WVU Art Collection, said at the time. That show ran at WVU and in Charleston.
“And her work hasn’t been exhibited as a major one-person show since,” says Bridges, curator of the Art Museum of WVU since it opened in 2015.
But now, with the benefit of an additional two decades of acquisitions and scholarship, Bridges is ending that long dearth with a traveling exhibition—one that will carry a nuanced view of Lazzell’s career to four museums.
An Irrepressible Creator
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Lazzell was born in 1878 in Maidsville, just north of Morgantown. She earned an art degree from WVU in 1905, then sought further training with single-minded focus. She studied in New York, possibly alongside Georgia O’Keeffe. She toured Europe in 1912–13, enrolling at Paris’s Académie Moderne. She summered at the artist colony in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, in 1915. And although she returned to Morgantown and family often, she made Provincetown her home.
At Provincetown, Lazzell learned the white-line woodcut technique, becoming its most dedicated practitioner. She is today regarded as the master of the process—although it may be that focus that held her reputation back. “Prints have not been as highly regarded as paintings through the years,” Bridges observes. But Lazzell didn’t consider her white-line prints “prints,” he says. “As the artist, you’re painting onto a block of wood. You’re then printing it and continuing to paint and build up as you would a painting. And you’re using watercolor paint—that’s why those prints are so luminous.”
Lazzell worked mainly in landscapes and still lifes, especially florals. Picturesque Provincetown was a favorite subject. But she produced some of her best-known works in Morgantown for the Depression-era Public Works of Art Project. Familiar PWAP prints include “The Monongahela at Morgantown,” “Waitman T. Willey House,” and “Campus, W.Va. University.”
Lazzell also painted and learned throughout her life. She studied cubism in Paris in 1923 and later took up abstract expressionism with Hans Hoffman, always synthesizing her influences and experimenting with form and color to create something distinctly her own.
When she died in 1956, Lazzell left several pieces to WVU and other West Virginia institutions. Many others were divided among extended family. She’d been prolific: more than 550 prints from nearly 140 woodblocks and an exuberance of sketches, paintings, and more.
Lazzell was little remembered for decades. But following a major 1979 WVU exhibition, art dealer Martin Diamond took an interest. “Her work ended up in the New York art market. And the quality of the work is so strong that people didn’t need to know who she was, where she was from, why she hadn’t influenced major artists, or why major museums didn’t have her work,” Bridges says. “They were buying on the quality of the work. And her reputation has just continued to grow.”
Today, the Art Museum of WVU holds more than 200 works, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s collection is of a similar scale. Pieces are held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and other prominent institutions.
The 2024–2025 Exhibition
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Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist consists of about 60 works from the Art Museum’s collection. Six sections, among them The Built Environment, Still Lifes, and Petunias, Provincetown, and Process, allow for comparisons among mediums and across time periods. “It’s sort of a tour de force of what her work is about,” Bridges says. “I think it’s going to be a fascinating look at her work, of a kind that hasn’t been done before.”
While the schedule is yet to be finalized, the exhibition will open at the first of four museums in April 2024, then make additional stops in the fall of 2024 and the spring and fall of 2025.
The exhibition is supported by funding from the nonprofit Art Bridges, which aims in part to share important holdings in regional collections with wider audiences. It will bring national exposure to the museum, Bridges says, and to Lazzell—who seems to charm wherever she is displayed. “There might be art critics and curators unaware of her work. They will fall in love with it and say, ‘You know, she really is a great artist. Here was a woman artist who graduated from WVU in 1905 and, on her own, without help from anybody other than her brother’s financial help, traveled the world.’”
Back in Morgantown
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The exhibition returns home to us in the spring of 2026.
Meanwhile, we can learn about Lazzell through ongoing exhibits at the Art Museum. “We’ve always tried to have a Blanche Lazzell piece up, because so many people come here specifically to see her work,” Bridges says. “For the past four years, I’ve been rotating exhibitions based on different characteristics of her career—groups of work that relate to a specific subject or time frame.” Currently on display are 12 drawings that have never been exhibited before—including Lazzell’s only self-portrait. The exhibit runs through December. artmuseum.wvu.edu
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