?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
BLANCHE LAZZELL The Flaming Bush.
Color woodcut, 1933. 305x355 mm; 12x14 inches, full margins. One of only 2 known impressions. Signed, titled and dated in pencil, lower margin. A superb impression of this extremely scarce woodcut, with vibrant colors.
We have not found another impression previously offered at auction.
Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956) was an American Modernist printmaker and a member of the pioneering wood block print society (the first of its kind in America) known as the Provincetown Printers. This small group of printmakers came together in 1915 in the artistic community of Provincetown, Massachusetts, which had quickly become a destination for artists living in Europe who were fleeing the turmoil of World War I. The group remains most noteworthy for having innovated the white-line woodcut print, or the Provincetown Print.
Inspired by 19th-century Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts, these artists carved their designs onto a single block, rather than multiple blocks in the western printmaking tradition, and inked each section with a different color. The small grooves between each segment create the distinctive white lines of these woodcuts. Bror J. O. Nordfeldt, also a member of the Provincetown Printers (see lots 215 and 216), developed the technique, but Lazzell is considered the master of the white-line woodcut. Renowned for her devotion to the technique and for the sophistication of her work, as well as the influence of abstraction and Cubism in her work, she gained popularity not only in America but also in Europe, where she first exhibited in 1923 at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.
