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White Peonies and Red Rose

Oil on canvas
19 1/8 x 17 1/8 inches
1917
Now on view: Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina

As published in: Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection

As exhibited in: Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection, 20182021, Georgia Museum of Art, Athens; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia; Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina; Wofford College, Spartanburg, South Carolina; Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia

Born in West Virginia, Blanche Lazzell was a pioneering American modernist, known for her white-line woodcut technique and her embrace of Cubism. Realized through a series of mosaic-like patches, this still life pulsates with visual energy and exemplifies the artist’s shift from a traditional, prescribed aesthetic to a more avant-garde approach. Lazzell first traveled to Paris in 1912, where instructors introduced her to the work of Paul Cézanne. White Peonies and Red Rose reflects Lazzell’s absorption of those lessons and foreshadows her subsequent—and passionate—pursuit of abstraction, which she believed to be the ideal means for conveying an “artist’s inner thought—yes, the artist’s very soul.”

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