The Venetian artist Beatrice “Bice” Lazzari was born in 1900. Though she first gravitated to music, at 16 she entered Venice’s Academy of Fine Arts. Lazzari studied design because painting was not an option. Its curriculum required life drawing—the study of nudes!—which for females was forbidden. In 1925, Lazzari pushed into painting anyway. Her landscapes showed an affinity with the Burano school of painters, and she began moving in artistic circles. When Carlo Scarpa and Mario Deluigi came to prominence in the 1930s, Lazzari was among those who broke from the figurative tradition (she also married Scarpa). Until her death in 1981, she was known for lyrical abstraction, as well as graphics and decoration. Illuminating a little known yet intriguing Italian modernist, this museum-scale exhibition covers six decades of Lazzari’s career, beginning in the 1920s, and includes paintings never shown before. —Elena Clavarino