Lucille Blanch (1895 – 1981)

Eighth Avenue at 56^th Street, 1930, oil on canvas, signed and dated lower right, 31 ¾ x 24 inches, ex collection Edwin A. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas, gift of the artist (labels verso)

$18,000

Eighth Avenue at 56^th Street is a prime example of Blanch's work from the early 1930s. Bright and colorful, it depicts a snapshot of Midtown New York with a hint of the calamity that was beginning to grip the country. Among the New Yorkers going about their daily business is an out-of-work panhandler in the lower right foreground, presaging the nearly 25% unemployment rate that would occur by 1933. 

Lucile Blanch was an American Scene and Social Realist painter. Born in Hawley, Minnesota, she initially studied at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts with Harry Gottlieb and Adolf Dehn, before moving to New York, where she pursued additional training at the Art Students League. Her instructors in New York included Boardman Robinson and Kenneth Hayes Miller. She married fellow artist Arnold Blanch, and the young couple spent two years in Europe during the 1920s advancing their artistic training through greater exposure to modernist currents. After the European sojourn, the Blanchs returned to the United States and helped establish the artists’ colony at Woodstock. She was also an early member of the Whitney Studio Club.

Blanch emerged as a significant figure in the 1930s, a decade in which she exhibited widely and gained critical recognition. In 1933, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her work was shown at institutions across the United States, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. She also participated in exhibitions at the Downtown Gallery, Milch Gallery, and Salons of America, key venues for American art. From 1932 to 1943, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Corcoran Gallery purchased her work for their collections. During the New Deal Era, Blanch contributed to federal art programs, completing murals under the auspices of the Treasury Section of Fine Arts. Blanch was a member of the Woodstock Artists Association and the American Artists Congress. The Blanches became close to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo when the two couples had studios and shared a telephone in the same San Francisco building.

After divorcing Arnold in 1935, Lucile took on a series of teaching and artist in residence assignments at institutions across the United States, including Converse College, Ringling School of Art, Sarah Lawrence College, University of Iowa, Wesleyan College and Mercer University. Throughout her career, Blanch received numerous honors, including prizes from major annual exhibitions, and her work entered additional important public collections such the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She continued to paint for decades, maintaining a consistent commitment to her artistic output. A retrospective of Blanch's long career was held at the Woodstock Artists Association in the fall of 1978, when the artist was 83 years old. She is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.