The life, career and art of Lucile Blanch remains overlooked. Her struggle against gender prejudice, institutional insensitivity, and political correctness is a poignant American story. Blanch’s talent, independence, generosity, humor and love of nature were her armor and served her well during her long life.
Lucile Blanch was a true Woodstocker. She arrived here from her native Minnesota in 1923 by way of the Art Students League. Boardman Robinson and Kenneth Hayes Miller were her teachers. That period was a seminal time for the energized art colony (see commentary on Judson Smith, Konrad Cramer and history of the Woodstock Artists Association). She had married fellow Minnesotan Arnold Blanch, spent a year in Europe and now encountered Hervey White who encouraged the couple to join the Maverick. In the bohemian enclave the Blanches presided over an open-air restaurant grandly named The Intelligentsia. Lucile baked pies and cooked on a kerosene stove. Arnold hunted squirrels and rabbits and procured vegetables and potatoes for the stew. Together they provided sustenance for the Maverick’s regular crew of artists, musicians, writers and actors. To supplement “cash money” the pair made lampshades and created small woven articles to sell in local craft markets.
Hervey White built a small wood and stone house where the couple lived (still Lucile’s home at the time of her death nearly sixty years later).
Incredibly, Lucile produced a body of painting during this period which comprised her first solo exhibit at Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Studio Club on Eighth Street, New York City. She subsequently showed her work at prominent New York galleries (including Milch Galleries) and museums across the U.S. In 1930 the Blanches moved for a short period to join a stellar group of cultural figures in San Francisco. There they met Philip Guston (who later moved to Woodstock) and cavorted with muralist Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Following a 1933 trip to Europe (on Guggenheim grants) the Blanches divorced. Lucille never married again. As the depression gripped the country, artists were hit hard and Lucile began teaching at small colleges. She explained that she mostly taught in the South because the colleges lacked funds and could hire women artists at half the cost of male teachers.
Lucille Blanch returned to Woodstock joined the Federal Arts Project and began submitting proposals for murals. During one prolonged battle FPA section administrators held up payment of $210 for her preliminary design. While she endured penury she wrote pleading letters to the officials but finally relented on the changes they demanded. She was paid a total of $640 for the finished work (Oceola Holding Informal Court with His Chiefs – Fort Pierce, Florida1938). In 2002 the mural was restored at a cost of $10,000.
Other important FAP murals were painted by Blanch in post offices in Appalachia, VA; Flemingsburg, KY; and Tylertown, MS. During this same period both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art acquired paintings by Lucile Blanch.
After the war the artist moved into a phase of abstract painting. This style of work never won the acclaim and attention that her pre-1950 work provoked. Upon her death she bequeathed one hundred paintings to her first art school in Minnesota. The Minnesota Society of Fine Art instead requested a small folio of works on paper and the cash proceeds from the sale of Lucille’s paintings. In 1982 her paintings were sold with little fanfare and a check was sent to Minnesota. -JC