Paule Vézelay: Living Lines

She was well known in the surrealist circles of the 20th century, but Bristol-born artist Paule Vézelay's work has been all but forgotten since.

The first major exhibition of her work in over 40 years, providing a look at the seven-decade career was recently shown at the RWA Art Gallery in Bristol.

"Living Lines" showcases over sixty works from both private and public collections.

Vézelay, born Marjorie Watson Williams, chose a more androgynous and French-sounding name to mark her entry into Parisian abstraction.

Since a retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1983, Vézelay has been all but forgotten.

Vézelay, born in Bristol, moved to Paris in 1926, signalling her abandonment of figuration and the beginning of her lifelong commitment to abstraction. Early paintings show this transition in process. In The Sunbathers (1929), her developing curving line suggests female bodies bathing in a pool of yellow sunlight, while Walking in the Wind (1930) mimics the style of her partner, André Masson (whom she refused to marry on account of his violence), with its beak-like figures, angularity, and agitated line.

Her admission into Abstraction–Création in 1934 confirmed her acceptance into the international avant-garde; while mixing with artists including Hans Arp, Joan Miró, and Wassily Kandinsky, Vézelay continued to develop her unique approach to surrealist abstraction.

The exhibition charts Vézelay’s interest in what she called ‘living lines’. In paint, these lines are depicted as free-floating curvilinear shapes emerging from white backgrounds, as in Forms on Grey (1935), and Enchanting Silhouettes (1938–41). While they suggest the female body, they are playfully ambiguous, drawing, too, on images of plant life, weather, and landscape.

She also experimented with three-dimensional forms through the creation of mixed media constructions. Five Forms (1935), rendered in white plaster, reveals her interest in modernist sculpture.

Vézelay returned to England at the outbreak of the Second World War, and would never again achieve the recognition of her Paris heyday. A tonal change is detectable in her paintings. Portrait of a Line (1944), for example, shows her continued refinement of linear shapes, yet is set against a background of storm clouds, their darkness and turbulence evoking a sombre mood.

By 1955, in a bid to support herself financially, she began to produce textiles for Heals of London, and designs for the scarf brand Ascher. In textiles, Vézelay’s work found a new lease of life, her organic motifs and experiments with cut-outs well suited to production in repeat.

Vézelay might finally be getting the recognition she’s due, both for her role as a female artist representing Britain in the European avant-garde, and for her insistent refinement of abstract forms across a variety of media.