Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Blanche Lazzell
American; 20th-century
Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Exhibition: Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist)
80%
The White Petunia. 1932 (block cut)/1954 (printed). Color wood block print
The point isn't that figuration gave to Lazzell's abstracting tendencies a rootedness which her pure plays of form never quite managed to provide: she has plenty of figurative canvases that miss the mark. Nor is the point that her woodcuts' white line technique was capable of splitting up her surfaces without detracting from the deep connectivity of her forms: there are prints of hers where the lines interrupt rather than strengthen and accent the harmonies between shapes. The point of this print is less absolute than either of those observations. The work is depictive without seeming hinged on any one imagistic moment; it unfurls without losing its center of gravity; its dry tones and light registration hold it back from achieving the absolute superficiality — which is what many of Lazzell's paintings suffer from — that all of its forms seem to be arguing for. There's a cuteness to the way some of the representational structures are forced by the fractured design to break and bend, but then there are passages like that down-reaching rose at center stretching out over the two planes of green. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery (Exhibition: 18 Women: 50 Years)
61%
Composition. 1928. Oil on board
Lazzell's got a good basic sense for cubist structure — look at how the tilt leftward of that large tan square at bottom and the grey analyst's-couch-form just above it tip off the opposite lean of that curvy brown boomerang at the composition's top, with just about everything else in the picture standing up stock straight — and elements like that blue accent just below and to the right of center prove that there's some kind of color-logic to the painting's prevailing "dullness." But there's something about Lazzell's handling that seems out of key: for its focus on pictorial structure, the painting's surface is a bit too palpable, but not enough so to make it seem like a deliberate or integrated effect. Too, the density of forms comprising the central tableau is not quite justified by how they relate to each other; a similar impression could likely have been achieved through fewer means. (TFS, 2024)
Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Exhibition: Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist)
58%
Painting No. 1 (Abstract Study). 1925. Oil on canvas
There's proto-Stella there in the way Blanche spangles some of her surfaces, such as that dotted ovoid in the top left corner. The reason, I think, she gets decorative like this is to try and solve the same problem for the paintings that her famous white lines solved for the prints: that of distinguishing planes as depth without actually setting them in depth, and thereby preferencing any one region of the design over any other. Problem is, while the prints often manage to appear both sufficiently differentiated and pleasingly nonhierarchical, paintings like this one just end up looking stacked but dimensionless, while the dots and lines that adorn certain planes end up becoming busy. But Lazzell is to be commended for her colors, which while clunkily selected are nevertheless varied and at least surprising, as well as for the liveliness of her lines, which like Mondrian's pretend to be clean and clinical but are actually prone to stop and start quite organically. (TFS, 2025)