Reminiscing about her first summer in Provincetown, Lazzell nostalgically recalled, “Hundreds of American artists who had been living in Europe before the first World War flocked to Provincetown. This quaint old seaport town, famous for the first landing place of the Pilgrims, was already an art colony…To be in Provincetown for the first time, in those days, under ordinary conditions was delightful enough, but that summer of 1915, when the whole scene, everything and everybody was new, it was glorious indeed.”

Throughout her career, starting with her earliest sojourn to Paris in 1912, Lazzell remained at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde in both ideas and techniques. Lazzell briefly returned to Paris in 1923-25, where she studied with both Fernand Léger and Albert Gleizes. By 1925, she had mastered the static and shuffled planes of Synthetic Cubism, inflecting them with her own distinctive color palette and graceful sensibility. Her prints and paintings from this time count among the first Cubist abstractions painted in America, alongside those of her contemporary Stuart Davis, who in 1928 arrived in Paris and began his own series of similarly inspired abstractions. Cubism, as Lazzell defined it, was “the organization of flat planes of color, with an interplay of space, instead of perspective,” a style admirably suited to her woodcuts and to the angular patterns of the Provincetown houses, rooftops, and wharves which populate much of her work.

Lazzell was also a passionate gardener who kept an unusual assortment of plants in boxes and barrels at her studio along the Provincetown wharf. It is thus not surprising that the only living things to receive sustained attention in her prints are flowers. Lazzell started making these iconic still lives around 1927, after her second trip to Paris, and continued making them into the 1950s. These botanical still lives, although based on direct observation, were transformed into rhythmic interplays of abstracted shapes and interlocking geometries, elegantly synthesizing the tenets of Cubism with something of Hans Hoffmann’s “push-pull” compositional theory, which she learned from attending his classes in Provincetown beginning in the late-1930s. Lazzell’s progressively flattened and abstracted compositions were nevertheless linked to an observable, palpable reality. For as Lazzell described in her memoirs, “Commercial Street [was] where the gaily colored throng moved constantly. Creative energy was in the air we breathed.”

Like her contemporary Georgia O’Keeffe, Lazzell broke new ground with these abstract representations of the natural world, making her one of the first women artists in America to work in a distinctly modernist mode. Amaryllis (1930), is one such fine example. Here, with an economy of line and a vibrant, yet soft palette, Lazzell produced an image unique for her time and place, demonstrating a skillful synthesis of Cubist geometry with intimate and personalized subject matter. Lazzell was an artist at peace with her environment and once wrote that, “we make our own forms and colors, or are inspired from nature.” Perhaps more than any other member of the Provincetown Printers, she enthusiastically embraced this novel method of making woodcuts, which were filled with details of the charmed life that surrounded her.

Despite spending most of her time in Provincetown, Lazzell still considered West Virginia her home. In the 1930s, she was commissioned by the Works Progress Administration to make a series of color woodblock prints of historical scenes around her hometown, Morgantown, West Virginia. She also continued to spend part of every year in Morgantown, even after settling in Provincetown. In her youth growing up in West Virginia, the state was bustling with the coal industry and contemporary photographers, including Lewis Wickes Hine, who had traveled to West Virginia to document its growing presence.

In West Virginia Coal Works (1949), Lazzell’s fine cutting and meticulous, sensitive printing techniques are again evident, as is the subtle effect of visible woodgrain resulting from the printing process. The main structure depicted here is called a tipple, a facility used in mining to load extracted product for transport, typically into railroad hopper cars. The upward sloping structure at the left is the elevator, which carries coal from the depths of the mineshaft. Lazzell also includes a winding gray path leading from the tipple symbolizing railroad tracks, which transported coal from this region to the entire nation. Despite the primacy of industrial subject matter, Lazzell’s affinity for landscape comes through in this print, which portrays the gentle rolling hills and bare winter trees of the West Virginia landscape, popular motifs in many of Lazzell’s most celebrated works.