Blanche Lazzell. Blanche Lazzell was an American painter, printmaker and designer.
Known especially for her white-line woodcuts, she was an early modernist American artist, bringing elements of Cubism and abstraction into her art. Born in a small farming community in West Virginia, Lazzell traveled to Europe twice, studying in Paris with French artists Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger, and André Lhote.
In 1915, she began spending her summers in the Cape Cod art community of Provincetown, Massachusetts, and eventually settled there permanently. She was one of the founding members of the Provincetown Printers, a group of artists who experimented with a white-line woodcut technique based on the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints.
Nettie Blanche Lazzell was born on a farm near Maidsville, West Virginia, to Mary Prudence Pope and Cornelius Carhart Lazzell. Her father was a direct descendant of Reverend Thomas and Hannah Lazzell, pioneers who settled in Monongalia County after the American Revolutionary War.
The Lazzells were devout Methodists, attending the Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church. The ninth of ten children, she was nicknamed Pet by her older brother Rufus, a name that her family would continue to use throughout her life. She grew up on the 200 acre family farm, attending a one-room schoolhouse on the property where students from the first through eighth grades were taught from October through