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Dorothy Lake Gregory

    WOMEN’S HISTORY

    Discovering an Early Generation of Provincetown Artists

    Important women from Provincetown’s art and civic histories

    By

    In 2014, Breon Dunigan and Mike Wright curated the Women Pioneers exhibition at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum to highlight the important roles that women played in the history of the museum.

    Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956), who became one of the best-known Provincetown artists in the first half of the 20th century, studied in Provincetown and Europe, where the French cubist Fernand Leger was one of her teachers. She popularized the white-line woodcut technique and was a member of the Provincetown Printers. A 1939 review in the Provincetown Advocate described an exhibition of her work on Newbury Street in Boston: “Miss Lazzell works in moderate conventionalization, so that her pictures are both descriptive and decorative, and one feature is not moderated for the other. The colors are beautifully modulated.” (Photos by George Yater, courtesy PAAM)

    “Often, women artists in Provincetown married men who got a lot of attention,” says Dunigan, who is a fourth-generation Outer Cape artist. Her grandfather was the well-known painter Philip Malicoat, and a number of women in her family were also artists, including her great-grandmother Florence Bradshaw Brown.

    Anne Brigadier (1908-1989) was distinguished for her abstract expressionist paintings and use of collage. In a 1954 review, the Provincetown Advocate said, “The overall impression of Anne Brigadier’s work as shown in the Salpeter Gallery is one of great sensitivity … Every square inch functions, is well coordinated with the rest of the space, and from this great balance of well-organized space comes a feeling of rest.”

    “If you look at photos of art classes at the time, they’re packed with women,” says Dunigan. “But the guys got all the attention. I think that most of the big-name male artists did not take women seriously as professional artists.”

    Dorothy Lake Gregory (1893-1975) was a printmaker and illustrator. She lived most of her life in Provincetown with her husband, the painter Ross Moffett. In 1953, she joined a group of six other women — all year-round Provincetown residents — to exhibit in Provincetown, Orleans, and New York as Group 7. “Their works have been shown in the best galleries and museums in the country and though varied in style, all of them hold to the soundest of the current ideas on art,” wrote the Provincetown Advocate.

    Dunigan and Wright’s research also revealed that, in 1915, 11 of the 44 works that hung in the first PAAM exhibition were created by women despite significant barriers. In their text for the exhibition, they discuss Tony Vevers’s history of the art association, which located its genesis in the rooms of the Nautilus Club, a women’s group. Years later, George Yater, an artist who served as PAAM’s director from 1947 until 1961, photographed some of Provincetown’s leading women artists in a portrait project.

    Lucy L’Engle (1889-1978) was born into a wealthy and politically connected New York City family. She lived in New York and Provincetown and was a founding member of the New York Society of Women Artists. A 1929 New York Times review described her interest in complex pictorial challenges: “Lucy L’Engle painting a dressing table, with a mirror, in the mirror a face, and beyond, a window through which is seen a tall building, succeeds quite remarkably in keeping everything in its separate plane without insistence on planar perspective.”

    During this time, PAAM became a center for the sale of local artwork, and the portraits were made as publicity shots. Of the 34 photographs included in a 1992 exhibition, Artists and Their Art: The Yater Years, six are of women. It’s a record of the inequity of the time — and the women whose talent and determination were a part of it.

    Bakker’s Fall Auction Ends Saturday

    By

    The fall auction of Provincetown art by James R. Bakker Antiques will take final bids up to 1 p.m. on Saturday, October 24th.

    The auction is exclusively online at bakkerprojects.com. A large number of works by Nancy Whorf are featured, including Christmas-themed ceramics, as well as paintings by Ross Moffett, Helen Sawyer, Bruce McKain, Mary Spencer Nay, Sol Wilson, and Dorothy Lake Gregory.

     

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