In Provincetown show, a look at cherished studios

Artist Robert Motherwell's former studio (left) and an inside look at his workplace. (Renata Pensold (right))

PROVINCETOWN - Blanche Lazzell's art studio was just a shack on a wharf. When she worked there, in the mid 20th century, she dressed it up with clematis and morning glories. It still stood in the winter of 2002; artist Michael Mazur came down from Boston with curator Barbara Stern Shapiro just to see it. When Mazur returned again in early spring, it had been razed.

Its loss prompted Mazur to identify and chart the studios of notable artists who worked here. His efforts, and those of many others, have resulted in three exhibitions, all titled "The Provincetown Studio Show," at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum, and the Fine Arts Work Center, up through Aug. 3. A map for a self-guided walking tour is also available.

Lazzell, who died in 1956, was a great unsung American artist. One of the first women to introduce modern art to the United States, she settled in Provincetown in 1915. In 2002, the Museum of Fine Arts staged a Lazzell retrospective, organized by Shapiro. She asked Mazur, a painter and printmaker who has exhibited at the MFA, to bring members of the museum's print club to see the studio.

"The time came to bring these people down, and I went three days earlier. It had been destroyed," recalls Mazur. "It had to go through committees. Historical society, zoning board. Nobody knew who Blanche Lazzell was."

For the record, in addition to being an extraordinary abstract painter, Lazzell spearheaded a renaissance in a method of woodblock printmaking that had begun in Japan; today, the white-line woodblock print, made with watercolor pigments, is better known as the Provincetown Print.

"Besides [Hans] Hofmann and [Robert] Motherwell and people who passed through, she was the most important artist Provincetown produced in the 20th century," Mazur declares.

For more than a century, Provincetown has been one of the foremost art colonies in the country, with artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko spending time here to paint. But like the residents of any other town, they came and went, and nobody bothered to keep official track of who worked where. The destruction of Lazzell's studio planted an idea in Mazur's mind.

"It was the catalyst for wanting to do an exhibition of the artists' studios here, and to plaque them," says Mazur. After six years of research, more than 40 historic studios have been identified and photographed, and funds are being raised to put an palette-shaped plaque on each. During that time, a Provincetown Historic District has also been designated along the waterfront, with an eye to preserving the architectural integrity of the area; most of the studios are in that district.

At the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the show features paintings by artists such as Lazzell, Hofmann, Abstract Expressionist Jack Tworkov, and Charles Hawthorne, one of the artist colony's founders, but they're bonuses in what is essentially a history exhibition, packed with photos and morsels of information about the artists and how they lived.

The Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum exhibit follows the same format, spotlighting art and ephemera from the studios of artists such as Ross Moffett and Edwin Dickinson - artists whose names are not so well known today, but who were giants in the time between the world wars.

The exhibit at the Fine Arts Work Center looks forward, featuring mostly photographs of recent and current FAWC fellows in their studios. This falls flat beside the other two exhibits, so rich in lore. It's a pity, because FAWC is located on the site of Days Lumber Yard, which from early in the 1900s set aside space for artists' studios, costing as little as $50 a year. A book could be written on the artists who worked at Days Lumber Yard alone. Dickinson had a studio there early on, as did Hawthorne who painted "The Crew of the Philomena Manta" - which now hangs in Town Hall - there in 1915-1916.

"They lived roughly, unheated, as many studios were," reports Mazur. "They were pioneers of sorts, living the clichéd life of the artist in a garret."

Motherwell and Frankenthaler, who were married, had studios at Days Lumber Yard in the late '50s, before Motherwell bought his own place on Commercial Street, which he dubbed "The Sea Barn" and endowed with third-floor windows large enough to hoist a giant canvas through. That property is on the walking tour of studios, whose interiors are not open to the public. A photo of Motherwell's studio at the PAAM exhibit also shows a TV Guide opened to the schedule on the day of his death in 1991; PAAM executive director Chris McCarthy divulges that he always had the television on while he worked.

Hofmann, an abstract painter and one of the renowned painting teachers of the 20th century, had a house and studio at the far west end of Commercial Street that have long since been converted into condos. That's also on the tour, as is Rothko's Bradford Street house, complete with studio upstairs.

Painter Tony Vevers and his wife, artist Elspeth Halvorsen, bought Rothko's property from the artist in 1961. "I'm sure my dad was honored to be working in the studio, but he made it his own," recalls Vevers's daughter Tabitha, also an artist, who has spent summers in Provincetown her whole life. Vevers died in March. "There's one detail that Rothko left behind. A little wooden sailboat I think his son must have made. Daddy always had that displayed."

As a child, Tabitha Vevers says, she took the rich creative resources of Provincetown for granted. She and her sister used to visit artists in their studios all the time, such as painter Myron Stout. "He lived in one room and painted in the other," she remembers. "When I was little, he'd give my sister and me a pad of paper, and he'd hang our drawings in his studio. It was a pretty special place to grow up."

As for Blanche Lazzell's tiny waterfront studio, Mazur had a model made of it, which can be seen in the PAAM show, and there are a few photographs.

"The tearing down of the house was not a disaster; it was an architectural nonentity," Mazur says. "But it was a symbol of a kind of neglect, of people not knowing who the contributors to the reputation of the town were."

The razing of Lazell's shack spurred many to action. Says Mazur, "Within the town there's a greater awareness of its own history."