Sketch for Abstract Composition

1924

Blanche Lazzell made this group of objects—part of a larger suite of fourteen works—as an artistic exercise while studying in Paris with the Cubist Albert Gleizes. They provide a fascinating glimpse into Lazzell’s process of transforming a townscape into an abstract composition. The graphite drawings show her progression from a relatively representational image of an urban plaza with buildings, stairways, and trees to ever more reductive, abstract shapes that she rearranged and filled with different patterns and tones, culminating in the watercolor. This kind of experimentation allowed Lazzell to explore the expressive possibilities of abstraction, in keeping with Gleizes’s theories that the juxtaposition of flat forms—through their relation to each other and the paper surface—provides a new way to signify spatial depth.