^{Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956), Church Around the Corner, 1949, oil on canvas, 28 x 36 3/16 in. 
Art Museum of West Virginia University Collection, acquired through Frances Sellers.}

by Jaiden van Bork

Of the many significant artists that have holed up on the picturesque shores of Provincetown at one time or another, perhaps none are more well-known than the aptly named “Provincetown Printers.” Embracing a new printing technique inspired by Japan’s ukiyo-e prints, these artists became internationally recognized for their unique white-line prints, which depicted the iconic scenery of Provincetown and the Cape with playful, impressionistic approaches to color, form, and texture. But with these innovations, hardly any of the printers were quite as revolutionary as one Blanche Lazzell, a West Virginia-born painter and printmaker who is said to have perfected the technique.

When Christine McCarthy began working at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) in 2001, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had just begun preparations to unveil an exhibit entitled From Paris to Provincetown: Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut. Unfortunately, due to PAAM’s modest facilities, which had not yet undergone renovation, the exhibition was never able to make an appearance in Provincetown. McCarthy said this frustrated her, but she remembers defiantly telling a reporter, “We will get some wood-cuts into this collection.” Over two decades later, the long-time CEO has fulfilled her promise, bringing the traveling exhibition Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist (organized by the Art Museum of West Virginia University) to Provincetown August 29 to January, 2026. 

White-line prints or Provincetown prints are recognized by the small gaps in between different sections of color, where the artist has chiseled a line into the wood (hence their name). While the typical Japanese style of woodblock print made use of multiple blocks to layer multiple colors onto the page, white-line prints require only one block that is repeatedly pressed onto paper multiple times as each new color section is added. Such prints often depict generic scenes or landscapes, which has thus garnered them a particular association with the scenery of Provincetown.

However, compared to the work of other Provincetown printers like Edith Mars, for example, Lazzell’s work seems to be operating on an entirely different plane. McCarthy attributes Lazzell’s genius partially to the fact that she was able to study with not one, but two of Cape Cod’s “premier masters”— Charles Hawthorne, who founded the Cape Cod School of Art, and Hans Hoffman, one of the region’s most significant abstract expressionists. Thus, Lazzell’s work in many ways straddles two divergent styles of quintessential Provincetown art, containing elements of Hawthorne’s genre painting, impressionism, as well as of cubism and abstraction. 

Lazzell’s prints push the boundaries of the medium, presenting the pastoral landscapes of Provincetown or her home of West Virginia with bold experimentations with color and geometry. Often, she combines familiar natural forms like flowers, or in one instance, the iconic conch shell, with daringly arranged tapestries of planes, refusing to abandon reality or abstraction entirely. Her work is distinctly American in theme, but always tinged with European modernism in its construction—an apt representation of a broader transition in Provincetown and the art world throughout Lazzell’s long career. 

She indeed also studied with cubist painters like Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Albert Gleizes while in Paris, and, although Lazzell is known as a printmaker, she identified as a painter first. Several oil paintings of Lazzell’s are included in the upcoming PAAM exhibit, such as Painting X, a 1927 oil on canvas by the artist that engages with techniques of layering reminiscent of Braque, Gris, and Picasso and embraces the varied, flat abstract forms used by her teacher Gleizes in this decade. Parts of the painting seems to evoke the imagery of urban landscapes, while others look like they could have been ripped from one of Braque’s many still-life guitar images.

Though different from her prints, Lazzell’s paintings echo many of the same artistic sentiments: a play with shapes and their boundaries, stark contrasts, and a constant insistence on experimentations in vivid color. In some of her flower paintings from early in her career, we see looser and more organic forms, with few traces of geometric abstraction emerging—but even here, Lazzell is playing with chromoluminarism, the optical blending of colors, in the same vein as Georges Seurat. 

Lazzell was known to love Provincetown, and discussed her life here frequently in many correspondences that were conserved from the time period. In fact, PAAM holds a number of photographs in their collection of Lazzell outside her studio painting by her beds of flowers (which continued to serve as the subject of many works throughout her career). It is clear through her writing, if not through her paintings alone, that Provincetown was tremendously special to her, like it is for so many artists.

Lazzell lost her hearing when she was a teenager, and was deaf for her entire career. One could certainly speculate that the vibrant and unique sights of Provincetown might have been comforting amidst the oppressive silence that surrounded her most of her life. Fellow deaf artist, Francisco Goya in his deeply introspective “Black Period” is brought to mind here—perhaps Lazzell’s work emerges from a similar retreat into her inner world. But rather than a world of darkness, Lazzell’s work seems to offer us a taste of a world that is, indeed, even brighter than our own—a world of miraculous visual possibility, of wonder even within the mundane, of lightness and playfulness. 

It is by no means a world constrained to Provincetown, but it does seem to be one that the art colony had a hand in shaping. Now, Lazzell, in a way, comes home through her work, continuing to inspire local artists for decades to come. 

Blanche Lazzell: Becoming an American Modernist is on view August 29 – January 4, 2026. The exhibition opens with a public reception Friday, August 29, 6 p.m. PAAM members will receive an invitation to an exclusive preview the morning of the opening. A comprehensive schedule of public programs, including a lecture series, a screening of an original documentary about the history of the white-line woodblock print, workshops and demonstrations by local teaching artists, and more will be published at paam.org/lazzell.