A comprehensive group of artworks by Morgantown native and West Virginia University alumna Blanche Lazzell, who is known as one of Americas foremost modern artists, will open in the Mesaros Galleries at the WVU Creative Arts Center on Thursday, Sept. 9.
The exhibition will be on view through Oct. 29 and will also be a major part of the Women and Creativity Conference being held at WVU during Oct. 13-15.
David Acton, curator of prin2ts, drawings and photographs at the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Mass., will present a lecture about Blanche Lazzell for the opening of the exhibition. The lecture will take place Thursday, Sept. 9, at 5 p.m. in the Bloch Learning and Performance Hall (Room 200A). Actons talk will explore the development of Lazzells single-block-white-line woodcut, her distinctive technique, her extensive body of work, and her activities as a teacher and a printmaker.
Blanche Lazzell: The Work of an American Modernistis curated by Robert Bridges, who is curator of both the WVU Art Collection and the Mesaros Galleries. The exhibition is part of a year-long celebration of Lazzell as one of the first artists to create abstract paintings in America.
The West Virginia University Press is publishing the extensive catalog for the exhibition. It includes essays edited by Bridges and art professors Kristina Olson and Janet Snyder, along with 200 full-color illustrations and more than 50 plates. The exhibition and catalog highlight some of Lazzells most significant work created throughout her 50-year career.
We are very excited about this exhibition which surveys Blanche Lazzells long and varied career and presents the broadest overview of her work to date,said Bridges.The comprehensive group of works, assembled for the first time, amply presents the full scope of Lazzells career and her role as translator of the achievements of European modernism for her colleagues in America.
Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956) was born in Maidsville, W.Va., graduated from WVU in 1905 with a degree in fine arts, and went on to study in New York and Paris with notable artists of her day. On two extensive trips to Europe in the teens and again in the 1920s, she adopted the new approaches of fauvism and cubism. Her reputation is based on her role in the development of the Provincetown white-line woodblock print and on the prints and paintings she made using the abstract vocabulary of cubism.
In the early 1930s she was creating some highly regarded abstracted still-life prints. However, the American art scene of the thirties was more conservative and due to high demand by the Works Project Administration officials for Lazzells white-line woodblock prints, she spent much of her time from 1934 to 1939 creating art for the Federal Art Projects. The imagery was mostly popular landscapes from her native West Virginia and around her studio in Provincetown. Her involvement with German-born modernist Hans Hoffmann helped her return to abstraction. Lazzell joined Hoffmanns Provincetown drawing class during the late 1930s and later attended his New York school.
According to Bridges, the Lazzell works in the WVU Art Collection span her entire career and includes painting, prints, decorative items, and drawings that come largely from the artists bequest to the University. The WVU Art Collection is currently the largest public holding of Lazzells work.
Managed and programmed by Curator Robert Bridges and the WVU Division of Art, the Mesaros Galleries organize a diverse and exciting schedule of exhibitions throughout the year. The galleries are committed to showing experimental work that is innovative both in terms of media and content. The Mesaros Galleries also host contemporary artists of important or growing reputation who work in all media in the Visiting Artist program. All the gallery events and receptions are free and open to the public.
The Mesaros Galleries are open Monday through Saturday from noon to 9 p.m. They are closed Sundays and on University holidays. Special viewing times may be arranged upon request.
For more information, contact Robert Bridges, curator, at (304) 293-2140 ext. 3210.