The Brooklyn Rail

In 1913 the Association of American Painters and Sculptors organized the first large-scale exhibition of modern art in the United States. Known as the Armory Show, it was an opportunity to see what cutting-edge European artists had recently been up to, and it was a succès de scandale. But this growing interest in modern art followed a less publicized vanguard. From 1908, for example, Alfred Stieglitz made a point to show artists such as Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso in his New York galleries, and other budding American modernists like Blanche Lazzell, now the subject of a retrospective at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, had already begun to chart their own paths. Lazzell spent most of 1912 and 1913 in Paris, where she attended classes at the Académie Julian and the Académie Moderne and visited the Salon d’Automne and the Salon de la Section d’or. Here she absorbed the lessons of French modernism and had her first exposure to Cubism, an encounter that would shape her practice decisively. Upon returning to the United States, Lazzell joined the community of artists that had grown up in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she developed a distinctively process-oriented approach to Cubist composition.

The Bruce’s wide-ranging chronological look at Lazzell’s career, which stretched into the 1950s, begins with four works from the late 1910s that show her experimenting with Fauvist color and divisionist paint handling. But these are really just a prelude, and the show begins to come into focus with Roofs (1918/19), The Graveyard (1918), and Among the Wharves (1919), which Lazzell created in Provincetown using the town’s distinctive white-line woodcut technique. For these works, known as “Provincetown Prints,” the contours of objects are incised into the wood block, leaving white borders around areas of inked color. Lazzell’s use of this technique already shows her assimilating Cubist geometries—Among the Wharves in particular stages a tight network of forms across a shallow foreground, with only the more traditionally-rendered buildings that peek in at the top of the image conveying a sense of depth.

The 1920s provide the richest body of work included here, as the abstract qualities of Lazzell’s practice come dramatically to the fore. This exploration of abstraction emerged from a dialogue between Cubist painting and the “Provincetown Print” process—the Bruce’s installation makes this clear with a suite of six related works from 1922 that all picture the tower of Provincetown’s Center Methodist Episcopal Church. We first encounter a charcoal drawing that renders the building (also painted by Charles Demuth, among others) as an aggressively flattened network of geometric forms. This composition is then rearticulated on two woodblocks and two prints made from them. One of the blocks is in the Provincetown style and the print made from it displays the white lines that are characteristic of the technique. The second “key” block, however, is carved with contours raised instead. The second print was made by combining both blocks, with the key block filling the space between colored forms with black lines, an effect that the Bruce’s wall label rightly compares to the church’s stained-glass windows. Finally, we come to an oil painting version of the same composition that combines the cubist structure of the drawing, blocks, and prints with a painterly color and handling that recalls Wassily Kandinsky.

Lazzell’s commitment to an iterative process of subtle variation becomes yet more visible as her works grow more abstract. In the same room as the “Provincetown Church Tower” suite, curator Dr. Jordan Hillman has grouped four oil paintings that are all developed from the same compositional structure: Painting VI (1925) through Painting IX (1927). These abstract works are composed with great clarity as a “stack” of flat abstract planes—they exemplify the pictorial logic associated with Synthetic Cubism, which emerged from Picasso and Georges Braque’s experiments with papier collé. But Lazzell’s paintings gesture more toward the serial logic of printmaking, as these works all play with a very similar repertoire of forms. In three of the four we find a canted square or rectangle at bottom left, a sweeping curve to the right, above that the silhouette of a jar or vase, and finally a thin vertical band to the left. Color and texture vary throughout, and although it doesn’t include exactly the same forms as the others, Painting VI, the odd man out, does reproduce the structure of this shared composition in simplified form.

Despite the important influence of printmaking on Lazzell’s thought process and practice, in the later 1920s she focused primarily on painting, and at the Bruce we see her developing the compositions of her abstract paintings through a variety of drawings and studies. Some of these, like Abstract Windmill (Study for Painting XI) (1928), begin with a motif from the observable world, while others are more purely abstract in their conception. In particular, three fascinating drawings from 1924 show us how Lazzell made use of the golden ratio, a technique she picked up from Albert Gleizes on a second trip to Paris in 1923 and 1924. But printmaking is never entirely absent. With the drawing, woodblock, and final print all titled Abstraction B (1926)—this is one of only two such prints the artist created between 1924 and 1928—we see her working through another variation on the Synthetic Cubist composition she explored in Painting VI and its siblings.

The 1930s saw a dramatic shift in Lazzell’s work, as she was commissioned by the Public Works of Art Project to create prints of historical buildings in the area of Morgantown, West Virginia. Although these works were of necessity naturalistic, there is a clarity and geometric rigor to the composition of images like Waitman T. Willey House (1934), and Campus, W. Va, University (1934/35) that testifies to the importance of abstraction and cubist structure in Lazzell’s thinking. By the end of the decade she had arrived at a compelling synthesis; we can see this in Fatio House II (1940), where the image is cropped so that framing foreground elements take on the appearance of a purely abstract armature surrounding the subject.

Through the 1940s Lazzell continued to paint in naturalistic modes, but also began reengaging abstraction more explicitly. A pair of works from 1943 and another pair from 1945 show us her interest in recapturing something like her abstract Cubist vocabulary of the 1920s, but here the handling is looser and more flexible, the compositions less clearly focused toward the center of the canvas. Instead they begin to approach the “all-over” rejection of pictorial hierarchy that would soon be made famous as a hallmark of Abstract Expressionism. As a result, her hybridization of representation and abstraction grew more sophisticated as well: the very effective painting Church Around the Corner (1949) recasts Manhattan’s urban landscape as a geometric grid that extends more or less consistently across the picture plane. Meanwhile, the foreground of the woodblock print West Virginia University Farmhouse (1950) contains trees rendered as dynamic shards of color that seem to float in front of the titular building, seemingly superimposing a flat abstract composition over an illusion of depth.

The Bruce’s exhibition closes with two striking paintings and a print from the early 1950s that are the most thoroughly abstract in the show. Although built from flat forms in solid colors, these works eschew the Synthetic Cubist layering of the 1920s abstractions. Instead, they are well-balanced networks of spiky, interlocking forms that broadly echo the trees of West Virginia University Farmhouse. There is a hint of Malevich’s Suprematism here too, but instead of drifting in a boundless white void, Lazzell’s compositions are pulled taut, filling the picture plane as consistently as Church Around the Corner’s cityscape. These works, executed in the years leading up to Lazzell’s death in 1956, seem to represent her successful synthesis of everything that came before.

Becoming an American Modernist lives up to its process-oriented title, illuminating both the material processes Lazzell used throughout her career and the more complex thought processes that informed her choices of subject and composition. Beyond showing us an accomplished and underappreciated body of work, the Bruce has provided a valuable lesson in the value of careful, step-by-step creative evolution—contemporary artists still in the process of their own becoming take note.