Abstract composition 1968

1892-1984

Paule Vézelay was born in England in 1892, but by the 1930s she had become an active member of the Parisian avant-garde movement after moving to France and adopting the name Paule Vézelay. She lived for several years with the Surrealist artist André Masson, and mixed with many of the most significant artists of pre-war Paris including Kandinsky, Miro, Mondrian, and her great friends Jean Arp and his wife Sophie Tauber-Arp. She also worked with Pablo Picasso.

Vezelay was invited to join the group Abstraction-Création in 1934 and exhibited in several significant pioneering exhibitions of non-figurative art in France, Italy and Holland. As her friend the British artist Paul Nash wrote in 1936, Vézelay 'contributed steadily to the modern movement.'

Her early work was figurative, but apart from her Surrealist-inspired works from the 1930s and her wartime drawings, she became the first British artist to commit herself totally to the abstract movement.

Vezelay returned to England in 1939 and almost dissapeared from the public eye until the Tate Gallery held a retrospective of her work in 1983. She was often described as "an innovator of non-figurative art" and in The Dictionary of Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor wrote that "few artists illustrate as well as Paule Vezalay the many-sidedness of art. She has practiced painting, sculpture, collages, compositions with stretched strings, drawings, engraving. Her work has a discreet charm and elegant purity."