Lucile Blanch (1895–1981) was a Minnesota-born painter, printmaker, and muralist whose career carried her from the western Minnesota prairie to the front ranks of American art. She was born Lucile Esma Lundquist on December 31, 1895, in Hawley, Minnesota, and came of age artistically in Minneapolis, studying at the Minneapolis School of Art — today the Minneapolis College of Art and Design — in the years around 1916–1918. Her Minneapolis circle included the future printmakers Wanda Gág, Adolf Dehn and Harry Gottlieb, as well as a future husband Arnold Blanch, whom she married in 1920. She belonged to a remarkable generation of Minnesota artists who went on to shape American graphic art.
From those Minnesota beginnings she won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York and helped build the artists' colony at Woodstock. Around 1930 her path placed her in the orbit of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: while her husband taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the Blanches shared a studio building with Rivera and Kahlo. Lucile — by then an established artist more than a decade Kahlo's senior — became a close friend who made art alongside the younger painter during Kahlo's formative first stay in the United States. The art historian Celia Stahr, in Frida in America, describes Kahlo, Blanch, and the young artist Pele deLappe drawing together regularly, sessions she credits as helpful to Kahlo's development. It was in this same San Francisco period that Blanch earned the Medal for First Award in Graphic Art from the Art Association of San Francisco in 1931, and in 1933 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting and lithography — a national honor naming printmaking among her core strengths.
Across a career spanning more than three decades she worked in lithography, etching, monotype, and woodcut alongside her painting and the Depression-era murals she created for the U.S. Treasury's Section of Fine Arts. Her work is held today by major American institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Wichita Art Museum. Lucile Blanch died on October 31, 1981, in Kingston, New York, and is buried in the Artists Cemetery at Woodstock — but the roots and training that launched one of the quietly accomplished printmaking careers of her generation were unmistakably Minnesotan.
From those Minnesota beginnings she won a scholarship to the Art Students League in New York and helped build the artists' colony at Woodstock. Around 1930 her path placed her in the orbit of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: while her husband taught at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, the Blanches shared a studio building with Rivera and Kahlo. Lucile — by then an established artist more than a decade Kahlo's senior — became a close friend who made art alongside the younger painter during Kahlo's formative first stay in the United States. The art historian Celia Stahr, in Frida in America, describes Kahlo, Blanch, and the young artist Pele deLappe drawing together regularly, sessions she credits as helpful to Kahlo's development. It was in this same San Francisco period that Blanch earned the Medal for First Award in Graphic Art from the Art Association of San Francisco in 1931, and in 1933 she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for painting and lithography — a national honor naming printmaking among her core strengths.
Across a career spanning more than three decades she worked in lithography, etching, monotype, and woodcut alongside her painting and the Depression-era murals she created for the U.S. Treasury's Section of Fine Arts. Her work is held today by major American institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Wichita Art Museum. Lucile Blanch died on October 31, 1981, in Kingston, New York, and is buried in the Artists Cemetery at Woodstock — but the roots and training that launched one of the quietly accomplished printmaking careers of her generation were unmistakably Minnesotan.
