Provincetown: The oldest continuous
art colony in America; a vibrant, diverse
and exciting art community that today
is home to over 50 galleries --
we're proud to be one of them.
Gallery Ehva represents exciting roster
of Provincetown and Outer Cape contemporary artists and offers
year-round workshops for beginners
and edvanced students of all ages.
We also work with local art collectors and show Early Provincetown Art and
Modern Art on consignment basis.
Our shows change every two weeks
with openings on every other Friday
evening 6 to 8pm.
Stephen Aiken
Tracey Anderson
James Bakker
Rachel Brown
Daniel Cleary
Barbara Cohen
Didier Corallo
Daniel Dejean
Donna Dodson
Mona Dukess
Rob DuToit
David Ellis
Nathalie Ferrier
Jenny Fragosa
Wendelin Glatzel
Irén Handschuh
Myrna Harrison
Alicia Henry
Jenny Humphreys
Leslie Gillette Jackson
Zehra Khan
René Lamadrid
Jonggeon Lee
Bill Liebeskind
Kevin McDermott
Andy Moerlein
Ewa Nogiec
Janice Redman
Jackie Reeves
Meg Shields
Richard E. Smith
Lisa Ventre
Michael Walden
Rob Westerberg
Tim Winn
Cyndi Wish
Ewa Nogiec, Director
art@galleryehva.com
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
WHAT WE DO WHEN WE
DON'T
MAKE ART
Gallery Ehva
74 Shank Painter Road
Provincetown, MA 02657
508 487-0011
© 2009-2011 Gallery Ehva
All rights reserved.
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Early Provincetown Art
Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956)
Painted round wooden box by Blanche Lazzell, 8 3/4" diameter and 4 1/2" height. The box was exhibited at the show at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, "From Paris to Provincetown: Blanche Lazzell and the Color Woodcut." The dates were January 23, 2002 - April 29, 2002 and the show travelled to the Cleveland Museum of Art from May 19, 2002 - July 28, 2002 and to the Elvehjem Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin, Madison from September 7, 2002. The Box was also shown in "Provincetown: A Creative Colony" organized by the New Bedford Art Museum. The dates were February 2 - May 8, 2005. This show travelled to the St Botolph Club, Boston from June 21 - September 10, 2006 and the Cape Cod Museum of Art from March 10 - April 29, 2007.
Blanche Lazzell was a pioneering American modernist.
Born on a farm in Maidsville, in the Cass District of Monongalia County, West Virginia, on October 10, 1878. Maidsville, an unincorporated farming community located a few miles north of Morgantown, was originally named for the number of unmarried women living there.
Her parents, Cornelius and Mary Prudence Pope Lazzell, had a dozen children. The Lazzells were direct descendants of the Reverend Thomas and Hannah Lazzell, pioneers of Monongalia County who settled on a land grant of about 1,700 acres shortly after the Revolutionary War.
After her mother's dead when Lazzell was only twelve, she became especially close to brother Rufus Fenton Lazzell. He called his diminutive sister "Pet," a nickname that was used by the family for her entire life.
At the age of fifteen, Lazzell left Maidsville to expand her education at the West Virginia Conference Seminary (WVCS), now West Virginia Wesleyan College. It was an experience that effected a permanent change in her, making it difficult for her to ever be content on the farm again. But throughout her life, Lazzell would look on her childhood in the country with great affection. She was convinced that the home grown vegetables, fresh air, clean living, and daily work contributed to her overall good health and strength. Specifically, she attributed her talent for cultivating flowers to her mother.
WVCS, a secondary and preparatory school affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, proved to be a major influence on Lazzell, shaping her ambitions, fostering long-time friendships, and fulfilling her strong sense of spirituality.
Blanche's grades ranged from fair to excellent, a remarkable achievement considering she was partially deaf.
After attending South Carolina Co-Educational Institute in Edgefield in 1899, she studied art at West Virginia University, receiving a degree in art history and the fine arts in 1905.
She moved to New York in 1907, and enrolled at the Art Students League, where she studied with William Merritt Chase, alongside with Georgia O'Keeffe who was a student at the Students League at the same time.
On July 3, 1912, Lazzell boarded the steamship S.S. Ivernia bound for Europe. During July and August of 1912, Lazzell visited the highlights of western Europe: Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, France, England and Scotland. At the end of August she left the tour group to travel to Paris, where she took classes at the Academie Julian and the Academie Moderne headed by Charles Guerin and Charles Rosen. She also attended several lecture series at the Louvre in the fall of 1912. During her year and a half in Paris, Lazzell visited a variety of exhibitions, among them a showing of Cézanne's paintings, a collection of Japanese art, an exhibit of Puvis de Chavannes at the Sorbonne and Saloon d'Automne. Before going back to US, she undertook six-week sketching tour of Italy. On September 30, 1913 Lazzell embarked on the long trip home.
By 1913, Lazzell had returned to West Virginia and opened a school.
In the summer of 1915 she left for Provincetown, Massachusetts and attended Charles W. Hawthorne's the Cape Cod School of Art. Among the artists in Provincetown that summer were Ada Gilmore, Mary Kirkup, Mildred McMillen, Maud Ainslee, Ethel Mars, Maud Squire, Edna Boies Hopkins, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, and Juliette Nichols.
After the summer, Lazzell returned to Morgantown.
Mars, Squire, Gilmore, Nordfeldt, McMillen and Nichols decided to remain in Provincetown for the winter and to do nothing but woodcuts. From their efforts that winter came the Provincetown printmaking style, in which the process of creating a woodcut print was greatly simplified.
Lazzell was back in Provincetown in the summer of 1916, asking Oliver Chaffee, who taught painting during the season, to instruct her in the white-line woodblock technique.
Lazzell took to this art form as though born to it. The artists specializing in this technique, including Lazzell, formed the Provincetown Printers, the first woodblock print society in America. Lazzell will work in this technique long after the other Provincetown Printers had abandoned it.
In 1918 Blanche Lazzell moved to Provincetown permanently. She found an old fish house on Hills Wharf overlooking Provincetown Harbor, first used it as a studio, later she fixed up her little place to work and sleep there, become part of artistic community, making friends with Ada Gilmore, Oliver Chaffee, Agnes Weinrich, Karl Knaths. Knaths married Weinrich's sister Helen, fifteen years his senior, and three lived together most of their lives.
She opened her studio to visitors, taught painting, composition, and block printing to increase here income. She loved to host teas for friends, and over the years, Agnes Weinrich, Ada Gilmore, Mary Kirkup, Tod Lindenmuth, Fritz and Gretchen Pfeiffer, Louise von Broedorff and Dorothy Loeb were frequent guests to her house.
She did keep in touch with the latest in modern art, making occasional trips to New York galleries, museums and visit friends. She belonged to the Societe Anonyme, an international arts society founded to provide a center for study and promotion of modern art. Headed by artist-collector Katherine Dreier, the organization boasted Vassily Kandinsky as vice-president and Marcel Duchamp as secretary.
During a trip to Europe in 1923, Lazzell studied cubism with Fernand Leger and also received instruction from Andre Lhote and Albert Gleizes. She returned to America in 1924, and from 1937 to 1938 studied with the abstract artist and teacher Hans Hofmann.
In the mid-1920s she painted a series of completely abstract paintings and experimented with abstract designs in her woodblocks, making her one of the first Americans to work with purely non-representational subject matter.
[Blanche Lazzell, The Life and Work of an American Modernist]