White Peonies and Red Rose
Oil on canvas
19 1/8 x 17 1/8 inches
1917
Blanche Lazzell enjoyed two sojourns studying in France, the first before World War I, the second in the 1920s. Her paintings from these visits bear the marks of two of the most influential subgenres within the modernist movement: Post-Impressionism, which attempted to express and celebrate the emotional state of the artist, and Cubism, which experimented with dimensionality and geometry. Lazzell also frequented Provincetown, Massachusetts, and embraced a modernist type of printmaking known as the white-line method.
In White Peonies and Red Rose from 1917, Lazzell used small daubs of pigment to create a mosaic-like surface for her still life, which was a traditional genre for artists to experiment and demonstrate their technical skills. The glass and the vase are remarkable in their transparency, while simultaneously reflecting a light source behind the viewer.
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, 2018–2021, 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.”
Other works by this artist