Beach House, Spring 2024

22 | Provincetown Independent | BEACH / HOUSE | Spring 2024
The Art of Blanche Lazzell’s Flowers
continued from page 21
elbows are not strong enough to carry
water another summer. I think that
excuse is enough to have that convenience,
don’t you?”
To promote the sale of her artwork,
Lazzell held classes and intimate
teas at her studio where she
served sponge cake, cream cheese and
pimento sandwiches, and saltines with
homemade beach plum jelly. “I have
had four teas since the first of Sept.,”
Lazzell wrote in a 1932 letter. “You
see my teas cost very little. My flower
seeds more than paid for them.”
She harvested her seeds for sale
as a side gig, especially her petunias
with their almost cubist stripes, rays,
veins, and splotches. “People everywhere
are after my petunia seeds,”
she wrote. “I am selling them for 35
cents a package” — around $7 today.
Hers were worth it, she explained:
“Of course the package is not big but
mine are bigger than the ones from
the regular florists. And my seeds
are more rare for they are my own
culture.”
Alongside these practical preoccupations,
there was something
almost mystical about the garden
for Lazzell. “You feel, or what Mr.
Hofmann says, ‘you experience’ the
flowers, then your subconscious mind
does the arrangement,” she wrote to
her sister. “We must know and experience,
feel to the depths of our soul, the
flower, then we have this inner power
to do things with it … That is art.”
She knew of her value, and perhaps
even her future importance as
one of the earliest American abstract
artists, especially as a woman. When
needing to pay a tax bill in 1932,
Lazzell urged her sister to sell some
of her prints back in West Virginia.
“This is a fine investment for anyone
who has the money to spare. For
these prints will be worth more than
a hundred dollars before you know it
and especially when I no longer make
them,” she wrote. “And they are admired
by the leading modern painters
in this country and abroad.”
“She’s definitely at the top of
the pyramid now,” says Jim Bakker
of Bakker Gallery in Provincetown.
“It seems to me that she has eclipsed
many of the male Provincetown artists
who were more famous than she
was during her lifetime, especially at
auctions today. When you look at the
other people working in the whiteline
printing style, she had a big influence
over many people who came
after her.”
Always as independent as she
could possibly be, Blanche Lazzell
lived in Provincetown until her death
at 77 in 1956. In her later years, the
garden declined, and her beloved
wharf studio at 351C Commercial St.,
which tragically escaped the attention
of local preservationists, was
demolished during a renovation by
the new owners in 2002. “People in
town at the time felt like its destruction
somehow slipped through and
shouldn’t have happened,” Bakker
remembers.
Lazzell lived in Provincetown on
her own terms. Even if it wasn’t always
easy, it was worth it — a sentiment
many residents today would
echo. “The thing is to live as simply as
possible and do our own work,” she
wrote to her sister in 1932 at the age
of 54. “That is what I have done all
along & that is what hurts my knees.
It felt so good when I came back to
town. Two yachts are out there with
tall sails. The water is always so beautiful,
and my work goes on. I have my
painting & I am well. That much to be
thankful for. Love to all, Blanche.”
Marigolds, 1938, a white-line wood block print on loan to the Provincetown
Art Association and Museum. Lazzell’s homegrown flowers provided endless
opportunities for her explorations in abstraction. (Photo courtesy PAAM)
‘I bought a dozen lovely petunias last week and
set them out, one in a keg instead of three as I
used to. The woman in the shop started to give
me directions & explain why they were cut back.
In turn, I explained to her why they should not
be cut back and let her know that I have had 25
years’ experience with fluffy petunias.’
— Lazzell in a letter to her sister, June 25, 1945
Lazzell wrote that she loved to share her petunias, both in bouquets for friends
and to take to patients in the hospital. (Photo courtesy Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution)
Looking from the end of Lazzell’s studio pier, now demolished, toward 351 Commercial St.,
which was formerly a fire house. (Photo courtesy Provincetown History Project)
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