Blossoming of abstract artist Blanche Lazzell

They sport Lazzell’s trademark rich tones and the off-kilter rotational composition that she picked up studying with cubist Albert Gleizes in Paris in the 1920s. It supports a tightly coiled tension, but also a sense of blossoming. In “Untitled (Abstract Study)’’ (1924) she deployed layers of flat, asymmetrical forms in a quickening gyre. The piece, made with milk paint, looks almost like a collage; Lazzell added polka dots and stripes to certain forms. Picasso and Georges Bracque used scraps of newspapers and ads in their collages; Lazzell, in her collage-like paintings, referenced the patterns of domestic interiors.

She was a great proponent of the white-line woodblock print, developed around 1915. Rather than using several separately cut blocks to create a single print, white-line printers applied pigment to separate areas of a single block, working more like painters. It was the perfect technique to fit Lazzell’s taste for flat, abstracted imagery and complex compositions. Her gorgeous print “Abstract Petunias’’ (1946) in shades of teal, gray, and wine, all at once spins, splays, and contracts.

It hangs beside “A Petunia’’ (1945), in gouache, in which dancing but mildly bumbling planes of color twist into a bloom, with softer edges than in the print. Lazzell’s compositions are intentionally asymmetric, ramping up the push-pull tension that another of her teachers, Hans Hofmann, espoused. Her flowers aren’t pretty; they hold conflict in their very forms.

There are two more solo shows up at Berta Walker. Paul Resika’s floral still lifes pale beside Lazzell’s fierce petunias. Resika is a consummate colorist, and I’ve savored his abstractions and landscape paintings, but there’s something pat about his bouquets. While deftly made with fluttering brush strokes, they burst predictably from their vases, and look misplaced against abstract backgrounds.