Blanche Lazzell and Cubism: How We Started Looking at the Painting and Not Through It

Since the early 15th century, Western painting was bound to a tradition of projecting an illusion of space behind the picture plane (the actual surface of the painting) . This concept of the picture plane as window allowed us to look through the painting to a seemingly 3-D world. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, artists began to challenge this idea which led, through Cubism, to the assertion of the 2-D pictorial surface of the painting. This complex transformation, as it is related to Blanche Lazzell’s art, will be explored in this presentation by Bernie Schultz.