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Dimensions: measurements 28 by 36 in. alternate measurements (71.1 by 91.4 cm)

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM AN INSTITUTION
After graduating from West Virginia University and a studying for a year with William Merritt Chase and Kenyon Cox at the Art Student's League, Blanche Lazzell traveled to Paris in 1912. There she attended classes and lectures at various academies including the Académie Moderne where she studied with Charles Guérin. A few years after her return from Europe, Lazzell visited the Provincetown artist's colony, where she eventually settled. During World War I, Provincetown emerged as a center of artistic activity, welcoming numerous artists fleeing the dangers of Europe. By 1923, the appeal of Cubism lured Lazzell back to Paris where she studied with prominent artists Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Albert Gleizes. Inspired by her experience with Gleizes, Lazzell produced a series of abstract paintings titled with numbers when she returned to Provincetown in the mid-1920s. Her abstract paintings and woodblocks are considered to be among the first purely non-representational works by an American artist. Lazzell, who bristled at being thought of as a traditional artist once proclaimed: "A piece of music is a composition of sounds. Our painting is a composition of color." During the 1930s, Lazzell was back in New York, working for the Works Progress Administration, and studying with friend Hans Hofmann. She exhibited her pioneering prints and paintings regularly throughout the 1940s until her death in 1956.