Special Exhibitions
Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut
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Special Exhibitions |
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Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut |
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About Blanche Lazzell Blanche Lazzell was a member of a group of artists who resided in Provincetown, a fishing village on the tip of Cape Cod that had become an art colony. Inspired by Japanese color woodcuts, these artists pioneered the white-line woodcut or "Provincetown Print."Traditionally, a separate woodblock is cut for each color, but with this new technique a single block is used for all the colors by cutting grooves in the block to separate areas of different colors. The groove is not inked so that the white of the paper acts as an outline around the colored shapes. Though the white-line woodcut was invented by Nordfeldt, Lazzell became the leading figure to use this method, and, from 1916 to the 1950s, she created more than 138 blocks. Printing by hand on Japanese paper using watercolor instead of ink, she experimented continuously, trying various colors, so that each impression is different. By 1925, following two years of study in Paris with artists Fernand Léger, Albert Gleizes, and André Lhote, Lazzell combined the white-line technique with her own adaptation of cubism to represent the angular patterns of the Provincetown houses, rooftops, and wharves that dominate many of the woodcuts. Even Lazzell's floral images, such as Star Phlox (1931), inspired by her remarkable potted gardens, are arrangements of brilliantly colored cubes. The Monongahela (1936) is considered one of Lazzell's most creative prints. Born and raised in West Virginia, Lazzell depicts the sweeping river and houses in Morgantown in bold, geometric shapes, printed in rich blue, yellow, red, and green. She made only four impressions of Provincetown Back Yards (1926), which features overlapping houses sundrenched in autumn light, and bare trees. Abstraction A (1926) reflects her interest in the interaction of forms on the surface, rather than the illusion of three-dimensionality. In this work, she incorporates the grain of the woodblock into her design.
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