Blanche Lazzell (1878–1956) was a pioneering American modernist best known for her white-line colour woodcuts, a technique she helped popularise as part of the Provincetown Printers collective. Her work blends Cubist abstraction with decorative clarity, often featuring stylised florals, coastal architecture, and geometric compositions that reflect both her European training and deep connection to American folk aesthetics.
Raised in rural West Virginia, Lazzell studied at the Art Students League in New York and later in Paris with avant-garde artists like Fernand Léger, André Lhote, and Albert Gleizes. These experiences shaped her embrace of modernist principles, particularly the use of flat planes of colour and spatial interplay over traditional perspective.
She settled in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she transformed a former fish house into a studio and became a central figure in the local art colony. Her prints are notable for their hand-coloured, single-block technique, where carved white lines separate vibrant colour fields—each impression unique, guided by her intuition rather than a strict edition.