Lucile Blanch, Myakka Jungle, oil on canvas 22 by 30 inches. Wichita State University Museum label on verso.
Lucile Lundquist grew up in Warren Sheaf, Minnesota with an early talent for art, winning prizes at Marshall County, Minnesota Fairs in the summers of 1916 and 1917. In 1918 Lundquist began studies at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts where she won a scholarship to New York’s Art Students’ League. In New York, in 1920, she met and married fellow Minnesotan, artist Arnold Blanch. The couple moved to Woodstock, New York and in 1933, both were awarded Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships. The first-time a man and wife won $2,500 each, for creative work in painting abroad. The Blanch’s spent time in Paris where Lucile met, and was influenced by, Cezanne and Renoir, and in Mexico City, where they were friends of Freda Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
From left to right, Lucile Blanch, Diego Rivera, Arnold Blanch, Frida Kahlo, from Peter A. Juley & Son Collection, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
Lucile Blanch, Clown Aerial Act, The Girl on the Flying Trapeze, mixed media. Sighed lower right, dated 1935.
In December of 1934 Lucile joined the faculty at the Ringling School of Art as an instructor in still life and portrait painting for the 1934-35 and 1935-36 school years. At a 1934 Wannamaker exhibit in New York, Blanch won one of the three purchase prizes. Twenty-three of her paintings were purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art for their permanent collection. In 1938 Blanch painted a WPA sponsored mural Osceola Holding Informal Court with His Chiefs for the Ft. Pierce Post Office. That year New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased her painting Florida Wildflowers.
Lucile Blanch, Osceola Holding Informal Council with His Chiefs, 1938 mural for Ft. Pierce Post Office, later moved to Ft. Pierce Town Hall. Osceola Holding Informal Council with His Chiefs | National Postal Museum (si.edu)
One of a few women artists with a national reputation, she was a regular exhibitor at the Corcoran in Washington, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In Woodstock, Lucile is remembered as the “Grand Dame” of the art colony, and Arnold the “Dean.” The couple eventually divorced.
Lucile Blanch, Still Gray Heat, oil on canvas, 18 by 22 inches. Signed lower right and titled and dated 1938 verso.
Born: December 31,1895, Hawley, Minnesota. Died: October 1981. Education: Minnesota Art Institute; Art Students’ League; In Paris where she met Cezanne and Renoir; with Boardman Robinson in New York; Charles Rosen in Woodstock, New York. Exhibits: Sarasota Art Association at Ringling School of Art, February 1935; Federal Art Project, 1938, WPA commission for mural in Fort Pierce post office, Osceola Holding Informal Council with His Chiefs (now in Fort Pierce City Hall); Tampa Museum of Art, October 1940, Contemporary American Paintings; Rudolph Galleries, Miami, February 1953, in a group exhibit, Red Handkerchief and Children at the Circus, the later pictured in the Miami Daily News, February 22, 1953.
