146American Art Review Vol .. XIV No. 1 2002

P R O V I N C E T O W N , M A S S A C H U S E T T S

Lazzell & Loeb: Women on the Edge of Modernism

Constant from 1891 to 1893. Eva Hub-

bard instruted Blanche in painting.

It is not surprising that this initial tradi-

tional instruction in West Virginia led her

out of the hills to the big city where she

could see more art and seek more intense

direction. She was a pupil of William Mer-

ritt Chase at the Art Students League in

New York in 1907- 08 and probably

learned from Chase about Charles W.

Hawthorne who had been Chase’s teaching

assistant at Shinnecock until Chase closed

his summer school. It was in 1899 that

Hawthorne decided to open his own

school in Provincetown.

Lazzell’s studies at the Art Students

League were interrupted by the untimely

death of her father. Unwilling to sacrifice

her hard studies, she decided to take the

Grand Tour with a group of women dur-

ing the summer of 1912. Undoubtedly in-

spired by the art, architecture, and the

sights she returned to Paris that fall to en-

roll at the Academie Moderne under the di-

rection of Charles Rosen and Charles

Guerin with whom she would study at

Fontenay-aux-Roses that following sum-

mer of 1913. When she returned to West

Virginia, confident of her abilities, she

started her own art school.

Lazzell traveled to Cape Cod in 1915

to study with Charles W. Hawthorne. She

continued with her traditional study for

two summers with Hawthorne before she

drifted in to the modern camp of Oliver

Chaffee. Here she encountered many of the

friends she had met in Paris including Ethel

Mars and Maude Squire. Fascinated by

what she discovered in Provincetown,

lanche Lazzell was born in West

Virginia on October 10, 1878.

Her initial education took place nearby at

West Virginia Wesleyan. Her first formal

exposure to her art history was under the

supervision of William J. Leonard at West

Virginia University with whom she also

studied drawing. Leonard was a graduate

of the Academie Julian where he had stud-

ied with Jean Paul Laurens and Benjamin

by James R. Bakker

B

Loeb & Lazzell: Women on the Edge of Mod-ernism is on view through February 17,

2002, at the Provincetown Art Association

and Museum, 460 Commerical Street,

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 02657, 508-

487-1750. www.paam.org. The exhibition

is accompanied by a small catalogue.

A second exhibition, From Paris to Province-town: Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut,is also on view through April 29, 2002, at

the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 465

Huntington Avenue, Boston, Massachu-

setts, 02115, 617-267-9300.

RIGHT: Blanche Lazzell, The Pile Driver,

1945, white-line woodblock print on paper,

12 x 14, Napi and Helen Van Dereck.

BELOW RIGHT: Blanche Lazzell, Dunes inAutumn, 1943, mixed media on paper, 53/8

x 81/4, Napi and Helen Van Dereck.

LEFT: Dorothy Loeb, Tropics, 1926, o/c, 30

x 25, private collection.

147 Vol .. XIV No. 1 2002 American Art Review

Lazzell became a regular summer visitor to

the town. She first exhibited at the Pro-

vincetown Art Association in 1916. Over

the next four decades until her death in

1956 she exhibited 123 works in the Asso-

ciation’s exhibitions.

Although there is much less informa-

tion available about Dorothy Loeb, it is

clear that a friendship and exchange of

artistic information developed between the

two artists during this time period. It is

known that Loeb was born in 1887. But,

it is unclear whether Dorothy and Blanche

first met in Paris where Loeb studied with

Fernand Leger and Louis Marconissa and

Lazzell with Charles Guerin and David

Rosen initially or whether they traveled

together to Paris in 1923-24 and studied

148American Art Review Vol .. XIV No. 1 2002

with Leger together.

Lazzell also studied with Andre L’Hote

and Albert Gleizes. She painted her Nudein her 1924 classes with L’Hote. After

Lazzell’s return from Paris, her three en-

tries for exhibition at the Provincetown Art

Association in 1925 were not block prints,

instead there were two cubist studies and a

painting, which shows her newfound inter-

est and enthusiasm from her second Paris

exposure to cubism.

Loeb’s initial studies took place at the

Art Institute of Chicago where she exhibit-

ed in 1915-17 and again in 1929. During

this period a group of paintings from the

1913 Armory Show traveled to Chicago. It

is probable that this is where she first be-

came influenced by Henri Matisse’s work

that may have inspired her Nude, which she

exhibited in the 1930 Modern Exhibition

149 Vol .. XIV No. 1 2002 American Art Review

at the Provincetown Art Association.

Fellow artist, Ross Moffett, also had at-

tended classes at the Art Institute in 1911

until 1913. It is possible that she followed

Moffett and his roommate, Henry Sutter,

to attend the painting school founded by

Hawthorne that had drawn Lazzell to

Provincetown. Loeb’s first inclusion in the

Provincetown Art Association exhibition

records dates to 1923, when she exhibited

My Neighbor’s Barn. Over her lifetime she

exhibited forty-five works at the Province-

town Art Association until 1948.

The Provincetown Art Association and

Museum was established in 1914 by a

group of artists and townspeople to build a

permanent collection of works by artists of

the Outer Cape, and to exhibit art that

would allow for unification within the

community. After the outbreak of World

War I, many artists found a safe haven and

camaraderie at the tip of the Cape. The

light and subject matter available inspired

many of them to prolong their stay in this

quaint fishing village.

It would seem impossible in such a

small community that Loeb and Moffett

were not aware of each other’s monotype

production. A comparison of their output,

particularly in the early twenties supports

this conjecture. An untitled monotype pre-

sumably depicting Adam and Eve by Mof-

fett in the collection of the National

Museum of Art relates closely to those of

Loeb, which have spiritual, if not religious

overtones. Loeb’s monotypes have a certain

lyrical quality that almost borders on the

mystical side, as seen in her Bacchantes. The

allegorical prints abound with creativity,

fantasy and a fertile imagination.

It seems that Loeb followed Ross’ in-

terest in monotype rather than pursuing

Blanche’s penchant for the white-line print.

Although Lazzell experimented with

monotype, she produced relatively few in

comparison to Loeb’s prolific output. A

newspaper review from the St. Augustine

RIGHT: Blanche Lazzell, Abstraction, 1924,

mixed media on paper, 9 x 7, Napi and He-

len Van Dereck.

BELOW RIGHT: Dorothy Loeb, Bacchantes,1927, monotype on paper, 14 x 18, private

collection.

LEFT: Dorothy Loeb, My Neighbor’s Barn,

1923, o/c, 20 x 24, Private Collection.

BELOW LEFT: Dorothy Loeb, Nude, w/c on

paper, 14 x 20, private collection.

150

tional show for “the Moderns” of equal du-

ration at the annual summer members’

show. This new venue was voted in at the

annual meeting. Loeb and Lazzell would

serve together on the committee in charge

of the First Modernistic Exhibition held in

July of 1927. Three other women—Lucy

L’Engle, Agnes Weinrich and Ellen Raven-

scroft—joined them with seven men—

Floyd Clymer, Edwin Dickinson, Charles

Kaeselau, Karl Knaths, William L’Engle,

Tod Lindenmuth and Ross Moffett—to

form the jury and hanging committee. The

“modern” show continued for ten years and

required a vote each year by the Trustees

and was approved annually with some re-

luctance by the old guard until the tradi-

tionalists and the moderns merged into one

combined summer show in 1937. It has

been suggested that as the two groups

evolved, the artists had more in common

with each other than they had differences.

Loeb was included as a prominent

artist by Nancy W. Paine Smith in her

1927 Book About the Artists. Smith also de-

voted an entire page to Lazzell stating,

“Miss Blanche Lazzell, a dainty little lady,

leaves a beautiful home in West Virginia,

and lives here in a tiny studio on the end of

a wharf, because she loves to paint and be-

cause she loves the sea. She makes her stu-

dio bloom with boxes of flowers, many and

luxuriant. She is a block printer.”

Loeb exhibited at the Worcester Muse-

um of Art in the 1938 exhibition AmericanPainting Today and Contemporary New Eng-land Painters and at the Institute of Modern

Art of Boston in 1939. Loeb and Lazzell

were featured in a two person Works Pro-

ject Administration Exhibition held at the

Federal Art Gallery, 77 Newbury Street,

Boston in the spring of 1939. By the time

World War II disrupted the art community

American Art Review Vol .. XIV No. 1 2002

LEFT: Blanche Lazzell, Cape Cod inAutumn, 1918-19, o/c, 17 x 193/4, private

collection.

BELOW LEFT: Blanche Lazzell, Johnson StreetCold Storage Wharf, 1942, mixed media on

paper, 121/4 x 141/4, Napi and Helen Van

Dereck.

RIGHT: Blanche Lazzell, Nude, 1924, o/c,

353/4 x 251/2, Napi and Helen Van Dereck.

FAR RIGHT: Dorothy Loeb, Abstraction,

1928, paper, 19 x 131/2, private collection.

BELOW RIGHT: Blanche Lazzell, ProvincetownCottages, 1943, mixed media on paper, 5 x

8, Napi and Helen Van Dereck.

Record dated February 24, 1944 by Phil

Saw describes Lazzell’s monotypes as

“done more hastily but the result as well, of

years of careful preparation.”

In 1926 Loeb and Lazzell came togeth-

er for a common artistic cause. A petition

signed by thirty members of the Province-

town Art Association demanded an addi-

151 Vol .. XIV No. 1 2002 American Art Review

once again, both artists were enjoying con-

siderable success, Lazzell selling her white-

line and Loeb marketing her monoprints.

They continued to produce and exhibit

numerous works in oil and watercolor with

fewer financial rewards. It is ironic that the

majority of their artistic output has been

largely ignored and neglected until recent

discoveries after their deaths have sparked

new interest in their significant contribu-

tions to Modernism.

Women painters have always had an

uphill battle to promote and exhibit their

work as equals with their male counter-

parts. If they married artists, they had to be

careful not to overshadow their husbands’

careers. If they did not marry, as in the case

of Blanche Lazzell and Dorothy Loeb, they

had to be careful not to antagonize each

other or offend the male hierarchy lest they

be deemed as Sunday lady painters and rel-

egated to show their work at Sunday teas.

If they did not attain success within their

lifetime, women artists were destined for

oblivion in the pages of American art histo-

ry. With the exception of Mary Cassatt and

a few others, it is only recently that histori-

ans have come to reconsider and rediscover

the contributions made by many of these

forgotten female painters.

Museums and scholars are reevaluating

and mounting major exhibitions correcting

this oversight based on quality not gender.

This Loeb and Lazzell exhibition attempts

to reexamine the creativity and individuality

of these two modern artists as painters and

focuses on a cross section of work created

between the two World Wars drawn from

local collections, most of which is being ex-

hibited to the public for the first time.